Lexical and syntactic influences on syntactic encoding in written language production by deaf speakers

It remains unclear whether deaf and hearing speakers differ in the processes and representations underlying written language production.Using the structural priming paradigm, this study investigated syntactic and lexical influences on syntactic encoding in writing by deaf speakers of Chinese in comparison with hearing controls.Experiment 1 showed that deaf speakers tended to re-use a prior syntactic structure in written sentence production (i.e., structural priming) to the same extent as hearing speakers did; in addition, such a tendency was enhanced when the target sentence repeated the verb from the prime sentence (i.e., lexical boost) in both deaf and hearing speakers to the same extent. These results suggest that deaf and hearing speakers aresimilarly affected by syntactic and lexical factors in syntactic encoding inwriting. Experiment 2 revealed comparable boosts in structural priming between prime-target pairs with homographic homophone verbs and prime-target pairs with heterographic homophone verbs in hearing speakers, but a boost for prime-target pairs with homographic homophone verbs but not those with heterographic homophone verbs in deaf speakers. These results suggest that while syntactic encoding in writing is influenced by lemma associations developed for homophones as a result of phonological identity in hearing speakers, it is influenced by lemma associations developed for homographs as a result of orthographic identity in deaf speakers. In all, syntactic encoding in writing seems to employ the same syntactic and lexical representations in hearing and deaf speakers, though lexical representations are shaped more by orthography than phonology in deaf speakers.