Sign language perception and linguistic experience

Abstract

Most deaf children have parents who hear normally. Consequently most deaf adults who use American Sign Language (ASL) did not learn it from infancy from their parents. Rather, most deaf signers first learned to sign after infancy outside their homes. The experiment reported here examined the relationship between the length of time that signers have used sign language and their ability to repeat ASL utterances. Forty‐five, congenitally deaf, young adults both shadowed and recalled ASL sentences and scrambled‐ASL sentences (simultaneous reception and reproduction versus successive reception and reproduction). The signers were grouped according to the age at which they first learned to sign: 0, 5, 13–15, and after 18 years of age. The quantitative results show that the greater number of years a person has signed, the more accurately she or he can shadow and recall ASL utterances. More important, the qualitative results show that the groups make errors that are linguistically distinct: The first two groups perform like native users of spoken language, whereas the last two groups perform like non‐natives. The results demonstrate that fluency is a crucial factor in sign language perception. [Work supported by NTID and NINCDS.]