Most deaf children and adults struggle to read, but some deaf individuals do become highly proficient readers. There is disagreement about the specific causes of reading difficulty in the deaf population, and consequently, disagreement about the effectiveness of different strategies for teaching reading to deaf children. Much of the disagreement surrounds the question of whether deaf children read in similar or different ways as hearing children. In this study, we begin to answer this question by using real-time measures of neural language processing to assess if deaf and hearing adults read proficiently in similar or different ways. Hearing and deaf adults read English sentences with semantic, grammatical, and simultaneous semantic/grammatical errors while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The magnitude of individuals’ ERP responses was compared to their standardized reading comprehension test scores, and potentially confounding variables like years of education, speechreading skill, and language background of deaf participants were controlled for. The best deaf readers had the largest N400 responses to semantic errors in sentences, while the best hearing readers had the largest P600 responses to grammatical errors in sentences. These results indicate that equally proficient hearing and deaf adults process written language in different ways, suggesting there is little reason to assume that literacy education should necessarily be the same for hearing and deaf children. The results also show that the most successful deaf readers focus on semantic information while reading, which suggests aspects of education that may promote improved literacy in the deaf population.

AIM Cerebral palsy (CP) is a poorly understood disorder with no cure. We determined the landscape of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for CP-related research. METHOD We searched NIH databases Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expendituresand Results, and Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization for keywords 'cerebral palsy' among all NIH-funded studies, 2001 to 2013. We classified grants by type and area of study.RESULTS NIH funding, averaging $30 million per year, supported clinical ($215 million), basic ($187 million), and translational ($26.3 million) CP-related research. Clinical intervention studies comprised 19% of funding, and focused on treatments ($60.3 million), early parent intervention ($2.7 million), and CP prevention ($2.5 million). Among grants that specified gestational age, more funds were devoted to preterm ($166 million) than term infants ($15 million). CP in adulthood was the main focus of 4% of all funding. Annual NIH funding for CP increased steadily over the study period from $3.6 to $66.7 million. However, funding for clinical intervention studies peaked in 2008, and has since decreased. Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common motor disability of childhood. The population prevalence of CP in the US is 2 to 3.6 per 1000 births, 1,2 and about 12 000 newborn infants each year will develop CP. In addition to debilitating motor and postural abnormalities, many patients also experience cognitive deficits, epilepsy, and visual and other developmental impairments. 3 CP is a heterogeneous and poorly understood disorder with no cure. Medical costs for individuals with CP are estimated at $1.2 million per person over a lifespan (2012 US currency). 4 Each year, new cases of CP introduce an economic burden of $1.9 billion lifetime costs in the US. Additional research is urgently needed to prevent and reduce suffering from this lifelong disorder.The amount of public funding spent on CP research in the US is not well described. There have been no National Institutes of Health (NIH) Program Announcements or Requests for Applications that contain the words 'cerebral palsy' in their title. 5 In 2014, the NIH held a 'Stateof-the-Science and Treatment Decisions in Cerebral Palsy Workshop' to discuss gaps in CP research. To further inform discussions about research priorities, we set out to determine the landscape of NIH funding for CP research over a recent 12-year period. METHODUsing the online NIH search engine Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), we identified all grants funded by the NIH between 1 January 2001 and 31 May 2013 that contained the keyword 'cerebral palsy' within the grant title, abstract, and/or project terms. A study investigator (ASM) reviewed each grant abstract identified in the electronic search to determine if the research was indeed related to CP pathogenesis, prevention, treatment, or symptomatology. Grants that were considered unrelated to CP by two investigators (ASM and YWW) were excluded from further analyses, as...

We investigated interactions between morphological complexity and grammaticality on electrophysiological markers of grammatical processing during reading. Our goal was to determine whether morphological complexity and stimulus grammaticality have independent or additive effects on the P600 event-related potential component. Participants read sentences that were either well-formed or grammatically ill-formed, in which the critical word was either morphologically simple or complex. Results revealed no effects of complexity for well-formed stimuli, but the P600 amplitude was significantly larger for morphologically complex ungrammatical stimuli than for morphologically simple ungrammatical stimuli. These findings suggest that some previous work may have inadequately characterized factors related to reanalysis during morphosyntactic processing. Our results show that morphological complexity by itself does not elicit P600 effects. However, in ungrammatical circumstances, overt morphology provides a more robust and reliable cue to morphosyntactic relationships than null affixation.