Gómez Merino, N. , Fajardo Bravo, I. & Ferrer Manchón, A.
Reading Research Center. Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology University of Valencia
Twenty children with bilateral profound to severe prelingual deafness (average age= 12:08) were asked to judge if a written sentence was correct while their eye-movements were registered. A target word was manipulated in order to generate a grammatical incongruence in half of the trials.The incongruent word was matched in length and frequency and highly associated semantically with the congruent one.Based on previous research suggesting that deaf children? reading is related to low grammar skills (Barajas, González-Cuenca y Carrero, 2016), we predicted that: 1) they would not detect the incongruence in terms of percentages of correctly judged items and 2) eye-movement measures that occurred in the target word would not vary between congruent and incongruent conditions.Results showed that participants were able to detect the incongruency during their judgments in terms of accuracy and eye-movements measures.Regarding the later ones, duration of first fixation, first pass, second pass and total fixation time in the target word were significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one.These findings suggest that they are able to detect ungramaticallities while reading.The data of a control group of hearing children is being collected and will be presented in the workshop.