Assessing sensitivity to semantic and syntactic information in deaf readers: An ERP study

Data collection took place at the NeuroCognition Laboratory (NCL) in San Diego, California under the supervision of Dr. Phillip Holcomb. This project followed the San Diego State University’s IRB guidelines.

Participants sat in a comfortable chair in a darkened sound attenuated room throughout the experiment. They were given a keyboard for button pressing and wore a lightweight headset to record their verbal responses. They were instructed to watch the LCD video monitor that was at a viewing distance of 60in.

Participants were presented with 180 sentences in white font on a black background. Conditions consisted of 30 subject-verb agreement violations, 30 semantic violations, 30 double (subject-verb agreement + semantic) violations, 30 word-order violations, and 60 control (correct) sentences. Sentences were presented in an RSVP design, one word at a time, in the middle of the screen for a duration of 600ms with an ISI of 200ms.