Self-paced reading was used in three experiments to compare the processing of certain kinds of English sentences by adults with typical hearing and adults with hearing loss. Adults with typical hearing use strategies for processing an input sentence, anticipating the structure, and leading to incorrect analyses. One strategy we examine in this study is the tendency to anticipate the position of a question word such as who or what, resulting in misplacement of the question word; a second strategy we examine is the tendency of adults with typical hearing to construe a phrase as associated with the most immediately preceding phrase. Experiment 1 examined the processing of simple declarative sentences, and provided a baseline for comparing adult readers with and without hearing loss. Experiment 2 examined the processing of sentences subject to the strategy of question word displacement, in which a question word may be erroneously placed too early in the structure. Experiment 3 examined the tendency of adults with typical hearing to associate a syntactic phrase with the most recent phrase; the experiment explored sentences with a temporary ambiguity between a direct object and a subject analysis of a noun phrase. The results from each experiment show that participants who were deaf did not process the experimental items in the same way as participants who were not deaf. We suggest that the lack of access to prosodic information in the language input during acquisition (because of auditory deprivation) results in atypical development of strategies for processing input during childhood in people who are deaf.