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Reading in Adolescents with Hearing Loss: Alterations in the Neural Processing of Morphosyntactic Structures
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Julian Ockelmann1, Julia Straus1, Elena Bolt1, Stefan Elmer1, Nathalie Giroud1; 1University of Zurich
Adolescents with hearing loss (HL) often display difficulties in written language processing. The role of morphosyntactic processing in these difficulties remains uncertain, although detecting morphological structures is often affected in spoken communication. The present study, therefore, examined morphosyntactic processing during reading in adolescents with HL, including cochlear implant and hearing-aid users, relative to monolingual and multilingual hearing controls. Participants completed a minimal two-word grammaticality judgment task while EEG was recorded time-locked to the second word's onset. The paradigm focused on article-noun, adjective-noun, and pronoun-verb congruency, while reducing sentence-level integration and working memory demands. While all groups performed near ceiling, adolescents with HL displayed slower response times than controls, and a similarly HL-exclusive reliance on working memory for higher task accuracy. Event-related potential data revealed that P100 amplitudes were influenced by congruency across constructions without differences between groups. HL participants showed reduced N170 amplitudes in the article-noun and pronoun-verb conditions, while multilingual controls showed an intermediate reduction in the article-noun condition. Conversely, incongruent word pairs elicited strong group-agnostic N400 and P600 effects across constructions. These findings suggest that adolescents with HL differ from hearing peers primarily at earlier stages of written-language processing, with lower efficiency in visual word form detection, whereas neural sensitivity to minimal morphosyntactic violations is preserved under reduced combinatorial demands.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Reading