Did the three little pigs frighten the wolf? How deaf readers use lexical and syntactic cues to comprehend sentences

The ways in which students with deafness process syntactic and semantic cues while reading sentences are unclear. While some studies have supported the preference for semantic cues, others have not. To examine differences in the processing of syntactic versus semantic cues during sentence reading among students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Twenty DHH students (mean age = 12.48 years) and 20 chronologically age-matched students with typical hearing (TH) were asked to read sentences written in Spanish with different grammatical structures and to choose the picture that best matched the sentences’ meaning while their eye movements were being registered. The picture options were manipulated so that, in addition to the correct ones, there were lexical distractors and syntactic distractors. The TH participants outperformed the DHH participants in reading complex sentences but not simple sentences in the active voice. In the correctly answered trials, both groups fixated longer and made more fixations on the target than on the syntactic distractor than on the lexical distractor. DHH participants made significantly longer fixations on the lexical distractions. Our results did not support a strict preference for either lexical or semantic cues in the DHH participants.