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Signers show stronger facilitation than hearing non-signers in picture processing: evidence from a semantic priming task

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Elena Georgia Mpadanes¹, Agnes Villwock¹; ¹Rochester Institute of Technology

Language experience and modality shape how humans organize and access meaning in the brain (Stroh et al., 2019). The present study investigates how Deaf and hearing users of German Sign Language process semantic relationships in a picture-based priming task. Semantic priming refers to the facilitation of processing a target stimulus when a semantically related prime precedes it (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). Four participant groups — Deaf native signers, hearing native signers, hearing second-language signers, and hearing non-signing control participants — performed a semantic priming task with picture pairs while the EEG was recorded. Stimuli consisted of 150 picture pairs from the Multilingual Picture Database (Duñabeitia et al., 2022) and were normed for semantic relatedness. Accuracy was high across all groups (M = 97.5%), with higher accuracy for unrelated pairs (β = 0.62, p < .001). Hearing L1 signers show slightly higher accuracy than hearing non-signers. Response times are significantly shorter for related than unrelated pairs (p < .001), indicating a semantic priming effect. Although response times do not differ between groups, the magnitude of the priming effect varies: Deaf and hearing signers exhibit a stronger facilitation for related pairs than hearing non-signers. These results replicate previous findings of modality-independent priming effects (Li et al., 2013; McGarry et al., 2021; Meade et al., 2017, 2018), suggesting that bilingual language experience could enhance semantic sensitivity. EEG data, which are currently being analyzed, will provide further insight into the underlying neural mechanisms.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic