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While several studies have reported a deviation from the normal time course of language acquisition in blind children others have provided evidence for a more efficient processing of the language input in blind than sighted adults. The present study used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to address the question at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Congenitally blind adults and sighted controls matched for age, gender and education, first heard an adjective followed by a noun or a pseudo-word. The adjective was or was not semantically associated with the target and it was either correctly or incorrectly inflected for gender with respect to the following noun. Participants decided whether or not the target noun was a legal German word. Nouns primed semantically and morphosyntactically had shorter lexical decision times than those primed only semantically or only morpho-syntactically and decision times for the latter two conditions were shorter than in a condition without a semantically or morpho-syntactically congruent context. This response pattern did not differ between groups. However, blind participants had shorter reaction times than sighted for pseudo-words, and overall decision times for words tended to be shorter in the blind as well. It is concluded that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults most likely originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]