Testing the Development of Linguistic Knowledge in Adult Naïve Learners of American Sign Language

The present study was designed to investigate the ways in which notions of semantics and phonology are acquired by adult naïve learners of American Sign Language (ASL) when they are first exposed to a set of simple signs. First, a set of ASL signs was tested for nontransparency and a set of signs was selected for subsequent use. Next, a set of semantically related English words and a set of phonologically related English words were generated and paired with each of the signs selected earlier. In the experiment reported here, participants were taught pairs of sign-English word translations. Subsequently, they were then engaged in a translation recognition task in which foils were semantically related, phonologically related, or completely unrelated to the corresponding translations. Interference in performing the recognition task (i.e., the foil conditions) indicated that participants had encoded various features of the sign-word combinations after a single learning session. Results are discussed with regard to bilingual memory representations as well as to ASL acquisition.