Abstract
We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into ‘skilled’ and ‘less-skilled’ signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is consistent with the theory that first language learning promotes second language through transference of linguistic elements irrespective of the transparency of mapping of grammatical structures between the two languages.
Highlights
Learning to read is a difficult task for most deaf individuals
Rationale of present study We examined how general American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency relates to increased English sentence comprehension in school-age deaf signers
Our first analysis examined the overall relationship between ASL and English using a Pearson correlation between ASL ability and English reading ability
Summary
Learning to read is a difficult task for most deaf individuals. Sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL) do not have a written form, and a written language like English is not an orthographic code for a signed language. Hearing individuals learn a spoken language through the auditory modality prior to learning to read, and subsequently learn to map the written word onto their knowledge of this spoken code. When a hearing reader sees a word on the page they have access to the word’s orthographic form and, at least in alphabetic orthographies like English, can compute its phonological form. This access to phonology allows hearing readers to parse written words into their individual phonemes making the semantics of even unfamiliar words accessible through decomposition. Deaf readers on the other hand must rely more heavily on orthography to access meaning in written language (notwithstanding evidence suggesting that some higher-achieving deaf readers have some limited access to phonology [3,4,5])
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