Jill P. Morford

When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word pairs that were semantically related were judged more quickly when the form of the ASL translation was also similar whereas word pairs that were semantically unrelated were judged more slowly when the form of the ASL translation was similar. A control group of hearing bilinguals without any knowledge of ASL produced an entirely different pattern of results. Taken together, these results constitute the first demonstration that deaf readers activate the ASL translations of written words under conditions in which the translation is neither present perceptually nor required to perform the task.

Once Is Not Enough: Standards of Well-Formedness in Manual Communication Created over Three Different Timespans.

In these studies, the As compare (1) a conventional sign language used by a community of signers and passed down from generation to generation with (2) gestures invented by a deaf child over a period of years and (3) gestures invented by nonsigning hearing individuals on the spot. Thus, they compare communication in the manual modality created over three different timespans - historical, ontogenic and microgenetic - focusing on the extent to which the gestures become codified and adhere to internal standards in each of these timespans. Their findings suggest that an individual can introduce standards of well-formedness into a self-generated gesture system, but that gradual development over a period of time is necessary for such standards to be constructed

Frequency Characteristics of American Sign Language

When signers communicate with one another, they use some signs, such as finish, more frequently than others, such as eagle. The frequency of occurrence affects both the way that languages are processed and the way they change over time. It is important to be aware of the frequency characteristics of a language when pursuing either psycholinguistic or linguistic analyses. This article reports the findings of a pilot study of sign frequency in American Sign Language. A corpus of over four thousand signs was analyzed, and some of the frequency characteristics that were uncovered are reported here. Appendix 1 lists the most frequent signs in the database.

Effects of language experience on the perception of American Sign Language.

Perception of American Sign Language (ASL) handshape and place of articulation parameters was investigated in three groups of signers: deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers who acquired ASL between the ages of 10 and 18, and hearing non-native signers who acquired ASL as a second language between the ages of 10 and 26. Participants were asked to identify and discriminate dynamic synthetic signs on forced choice identification and similarity judgement tasks. No differences were found in identification performance, but there were effects of language experience on discrimination of the handshape stimuli. Participants were significantly less likely to discriminate handshape stimuli drawn from the region of the category prototype than stimuli that were peripheral to the category or that straddled a category boundary. This pattern was significant for both groups of deaf signers, but was more pronounced for the native signers. The hearing L2 signers exhibited a similar pattern of discrimination, but results did not reach significance. An effect of category structure on the discrimination of place of articulation stimuli was also found, but it did not interact with language background. We conclude that early experience with a signed language magnifies the influence of category prototypes on the perceptual processing of handshape primes, leading to differences in the distribution of attentional resources between native and non-native signers during language comprehension.

Preschool-aged children have difficulty constructing and interpreting simple utterances composed of graphic symbols

Children who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems while they are in the process of acquiring language face unique challenges because they use graphic symbols for communication. In contrast to the situation of typically developing children, they use different modalities for comprehension (auditory) and expression (visual). This study explored the ability of three- and four-year-old children without disabilities to perform tasks involving sequences of graphic symbols. Thirty participants were asked to transpose spoken simple sentences into graphic symbols by selecting individual symbols corresponding to the spoken words, and to interpret graphic symbol utterances by selecting one of four photographs corresponding to a sequence of three graphic symbols. The results showed that these were not simple tasks for the participants, and few of them performed in the expected manner - only one in transposition, and only one-third of participants in interpretation. Individual response strategies in some cases lead to contrasting response patterns. Children at this age level have not yet developed the skills required to deal with graphic symbols even though they have mastered the corresponding spoken language structures.

Sign Perception and Recognition in Non-Native Signers of ASL

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.

Constituent Order in Picture Pointing Sequences Produced by Speaking Children Using AAC.

Children using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) picture boards often produce sequences of symbols that do not reflect the grammatical structure of the language spoken in their environment. These irregularities may reflect an incomplete or incorrect representation of linguistic structure. Alternatively, they may simply be the result of constraints on the communication mode itself. This study examined constituent order and deletion in picture board communication in children who are known to have intact linguistic knowledge (i.e., normally developing native speakers of English). The results suggest that English syntactic knowledge is not automatically applied to picture board communication. Additional skills may be required to transpose linguistic knowledge into the visual-graphic modality used in AAC systems. Moreover, the regularity of non-English responses suggests that there is a bias for specific structures in visual communication systems.

Bilingual word recognition in deaf and hearing signers: Effects of proficiency and language dominance on cross-language activation

Recent evidence demonstrates that American Sign Language (ASL) signs are active during print word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are highly proficient in both ASL and English. In the present study, we investigate whether signs are active during print word recognition in two groups of unbalanced bilinguals: deaf ASL-dominant and hearing English-dominant bilinguals. Participants judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated English word pairs had phonologically related translations in ASL, but participants were never shown any ASL signs during the experiment. Deaf ASL-dominant bilinguals (Experiment 1) were faster when semantically related English word pairs had similar form translations in ASL, but slower when semantically unrelated words had similar form translations in ASL, indicating that ASL signs are engaged during English print word recognition in these ASL-dominant signers. Hearing English-dominant bilinguals (Experiment 2) were also slower to respond to semantically unrelated English word pairs with similar form translations in ASL, but no facilitation effects were observed in this population. The results provide evidence that the interactive nature of lexical processing in bilinguals is impervious to language modality.

Relative clause sentence production using augmentative and alternative communication systems

Complex syntactic structures may be difficult to recognize when produced using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems that do not contain grammatical markers. The present study investigated adult English speakers’ production of Subject and Object relative clause sentences using a picture/symbol-based AAC system with speech output. Most participants avoided the potential ambiguity that resulted from the absence of grammatical markers. They followed spoken English word order when encoding Object relative clause sentences, but altered this order for Subject relative clause sentences. Most participants used constituent proximity to maintain the distinction between Subject and Object relative clause sentences. Results indicate the combined effects of underlying syntactic knowledge and pragmatic variables on the AAC constituent order patterns observed.

Word recognition in deaf readers: Cross-language activation of German Sign Language and German

This study addressed visual word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are proficient in German Sign Language (DGS) and German. The study specifically investigated whether DGS signs are activated during a monolingual German word recognition task despite the lack of similarity in German orthographic representations and DGS phonological representations. Deaf DGS-German bilinguals saw pairs of German words and decided whether the words were semantically related. Half of the experimental items had phonologically related translation equivalents in DGS. Participants were slower to reject semantically unrelated word pairs when the translation equivalents were phonologically related in DGS than when the DGS translations were phonologically unrelated. However, this was not the case in Turkish-German hearing bilinguals who do not have sign language knowledge. The results indicate that lexical representations are associated cross-linguistically in the bilingual lexicon irrespective of their orthographic or phonological form. Implications of these results for reading development in deaf German bilinguals are discussed.