Eye fixation measures were employed to explore English relative clause processing by adult ASL–English bilingual deaf readers. Participants rendered subject relative clauses faster than object relative clauses, but awaited animacy cues removed processing difficulty in object relative clauses. This questions prior advances that deaf readers’ sentence processing strategies are qualitatively divergent from those of hearing English native speakers. Measures of English understanding portended reading speed, but not differences in syntactic processing. However, a bent for ASL self-ratings to portend the skill to deal with syntactic complexity approached significance. Results propose a need to examine how objective ASL competence measures might provide insights into deaf readers’ skill to utilize syntactic cues in English.