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. 2012 May 3:13:44.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-13-44.

The influence of language deprivation in early childhood on L2 processing: An ERP comparison of deaf native signers and deaf signers with a delayed language acquisition

Nils Skotara  1 , Uta Salden, Monique Kügow, Barbara Hänel-Faulhaber, Brigitte Röder
Affiliations

The influence of language deprivation in early childhood on L2 processing: An ERP comparison of deaf native signers and deaf signers with a delayed language acquisition

Nils Skotara et al. BMC Neurosci. .

Abstract

Background: To examine which language function depends on early experience, the present study compared deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers and hearing German native speakers while processing German sentences. The participants watched simple written sentences while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. At the end of each sentence they were asked to judge whether the sentence was correct or not. Two types of violations were introduced in the middle of the sentence: a semantically implausible noun or a violation of subject-verb number agreement.

Results: The results showed a similar ERP pattern after semantic violations (an N400 followed by a positivity) in all three groups. After syntactic violations, native German speakers and native signers of German sign language (DGS) with German as second language (L2) showed a left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600, whereas no LAN but a negativity over the right hemisphere instead was found in deaf participants with a delayed onset of first language (L1) acquisition. The P600 of this group had a smaller amplitude and a different scalp distribution as compared to German native speakers.

Conclusions: The results of the present study suggest that language deprivation in early childhood alters the cerebral organization of syntactic language processing mechanisms for L2. Semantic language processing instead was unaffected.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overview of the ERP results for all clusters. Averaged ERPs of the semantic (first row) and syntactic (second row) condition for EGL (first column), ESL (second column), and LSL (third column) on all clusters. The dotted line denotes the ERP after the incorrect condition, the solid line the correct condition.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Overview of the topographic distributions of the ERPs. Topographies of the N400 (first row), semantic positivity (second row), LAN for 300–500 ms (third row), LAN for 66 ms each (fourth row), and P600 (fifth row) for EGL (first column), ESL (second column), and LSL (third column). Blue denotes negative differences of incorrect minus correct words and red denotes positive differences in μV. The annotation ‘66 ms each’ denotes 366-433 ms for EGL, 433–500 ms for LSL, and 300–366 ms for ESL.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Overview of the ERP results for selected clusters. Averaged ERPs in the semantic (first row) and syntactic condition (second row) for EGL (first column), ESL (second column), and LSL (third column) on clusters L5 (semantics) and L1 (syntax). The dotted line denotes the ERP after the incorrect condition, the solid line the correct condition.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Electrode montage and clustering. Four adjacent electrodes each were averaged into the 14 marked clusters, seven over the left (clusters L1–L7) and seven over the right (clusters R1–R7) hemisphere.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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