Semantic and lexical decision tasks were used to investigate the mechanisms underlying code-blend facilitation: the finding that hearing bimodal bilinguals comprehend signs in American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English words more quickly when they are presented together simultaneously than when each is presented alone. More robust…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast…