Sign Perception and Recognition in Non-Native Signers of ASL

Abstract

Past research has established that delayed first language exposure is associated with comprehension difficulties in nonnative signers of American Sign Language (ASL) relative to native signers. The goal of the current study was to investigate potential explanations of this disparity: Do nonnative signers have difficulty with all aspects of comprehension, or are their comprehension difficulties restricted to some aspects of processing? We compared the performance of deaf nonnative, hearing L2, and deaf native signers on a handshape and location monitoring and a sign recognition task. The results indicate that deaf nonnative signers are as rapid and accurate on the monitoring task as native signers, with differences in the pattern of relative performance across handshape and location parameters. By contrast, nonnative signers differ significantly from native signers during sign recognition. Hearing L2 signers, who performed almost as well as the two groups of deaf signers on the monitoring task, resembled the deaf native signers more than the deaf nonnative signers on the sign recognition task. The combined results indicate that delayed exposure to a signed language leads to an overreliance on handshape during sign recognition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the participants of our research, as well as Sarah Hafer and Joshua Staley for help in collecting data, and Gabriel Waters for assistance with data analysis. Portions of this study were presented at the 2006 Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Albuquerque, N.M., the 2009 VL2 Presentation Series at Gallaudet University, and the University of Hamburg's SFB 538 Center for Multilingualism. This research was supported by NIH Grant R03 DC03865 to Jill P. Morford and in part by the National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center Program, under cooperative agreement number SBE-0541953. The writing of the manuscript was completed while the first author was a Visiting Researcher at the SFB 538 Center for Multilingualism, University of Hamburg. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. We sincerely thank colleagues, meeting participants, and especially three anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their insights and constructive feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

¹Not all individuals with hearing loss participate in the sociolinguistic community made up of individuals who identify themselves as deaf and who most typically use a signed language and socialize with other deaf individuals. Thus, a capitalized ‘D’ is used to distinguish the sociolinguistic community from the usage of ‘deaf’ as a reference to hearing loss (Padden & Humphries, 1988).

²The sociolinguistics of communities of signers is quite distinctive from communities of speakers. Many signers are exposed to signed language through peers rather than through parents. If this is the first language in which functional competence is achieved, signers may consider ASL their native language even if they did not learn it in the home, or from birth.

³Phonological models of signed languages identify four phonological parameters in the sublexical structure of signs: handshape (the form of the hand), location (the position on the body or in neutral space where a sign is articulated), orientation (the direction of the palm of the hand), and movement (the path of movement of the hands during the sign) (Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965; Battison, 1978).