Table 1.

Demographic and behavioral data for the three subject groups

	Hearing	Deaf	Hearing native signers
English exposure	Birth	School age	Birth
English proficiency	Native	Moderate*	Native
ASL exposure	None	Birth	Birth
ASL proficiency	None	Native	Native
Hearing	Normal	Profound deafness	Normal
Mean age	26	23	35
Handedness	Right	Right	Right
Performance on fMRI task, percent correct
English
Sentences	85	85	80
Consonant strings	52	56	55
ASL
Sentences	56	92	92
Nonsigns	51	62	60
Numbers of subjects
English
Left hemisphere	8	11	7
Right hemisphere	8	12	9
ASL
Left hemisphere	8	11	8
Right hemisphere	8	12	10

^*Range of errors on different subtests of Grammaticality Test of English: 6–26%.