Lending a hand to signed language acquisition: Enactment and iconicity enhance sign recall in hearing adult American Sign Language learners

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. Morett
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Signed Language

scholarly journals Constructed Action in American Sign Language: A Look at Second Language Learners in a Second Modality

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Kim B. Kurz ◽  
Kellie Mullaney ◽  
Corrine Occhino
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Signed Language

Constructed action is a cover term used in signed language linguistics to describe multi-functional constructions which encode perspective-taking and viewpoint. Within constructed action, viewpoint constructions serve to create discourse coherence by allowing signers to share perspectives and psychological states. Character, observer, and blended viewpoint constructions have been well documented in signed language literature in Deaf signers. However, little is known about hearing second language learners’ use of constructed action or about the acquisition and use of viewpoint constructions. We investigate the acquisition of viewpoint constructions in 11 college students acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language in a second modality (M2L2). Participants viewed video clips from the cartoon Canary Row and were asked to “retell the story as if you were telling it to a deaf friend”. We analyzed the signed narratives for time spent in character, observer, and blended viewpoints. Our results show that despite predictions of an overall increase in use of all types of viewpoint constructions, students varied in their time spent in observer and character viewpoints, while blended viewpoint was rarely observed. We frame our preliminary findings within the context of M2L2 learning, briefly discussing how gestural strategies used in multimodal speech-gesture constructions may influence learning trajectories.

Differentiating the use of gaze in bilingual-bimodal language acquisition: a comparison of two sets of twins with deaf parents

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. DAYLENE RICHMOND-WELTY ◽  
PATRICIA SIPLE
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Signed Languages ◽  
Mutual Gaze ◽  
Signed Language ◽  
Deaf Parents

Signed languages make unique demands on gaze during communication. Bilingual children acquiring both a spoken and a signed language must learn to differentiate gaze use for their two languages. Gaze during utterances was examined for a set of bilingual-bimodal twins acquiring spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL) and a set of monolingual twins acquiring ASL when the twins were aged 2;0, 3;0 and 4;0. The bilingual-bimodal twins differentiated their languages by age 3;0. Like the monolingual ASL twins, the bilingual-bimodal twins established mutual gaze at the beginning of their ASL utterances and either maintained gaze to the end or alternated gaze to include a terminal look. In contrast, like children acquiring spoken English monolingually, the bilingual-bimodal twins established mutual gaze infrequently for their spoken English utterances. When they did establish mutual gaze, it occurred later in their spoken utterances and they tended to look away before the end.

Using signed language collocations to investigate acquisition: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 585-591
Author(s):  
Lynn Hou ◽  
Jill P. Morford
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Test Case ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Frequency Effects ◽  
Signed Languages ◽  
Signed Language

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge’s proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal collocational frequency effects and patterns that do not constitute syntactic constituents. While these collocations appear to resist fully abstract schematization, further consideration of how speakers create exemplars and how they link exemplar clouds based on tokens and how much abstraction is involved in their creation is warranted.

scholarly journals Neural Language Processing in Adolescent First-Language Learners: Longitudinal Case Studies in American Sign Language

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 1015-1026 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naja Ferjan Ramirez ◽  
Matthew K. Leonard ◽  
Tristan S. Davenport ◽  
Christina Torres ◽  
Eric Halgren ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
First Language ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Longitudinal Case Studies

Language Contact Considering Signed Language

2020 ◽  
pp. 678-693
Author(s):  
David Quinto-Pozos ◽  
Robert Adam
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
American English ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Signed Language ◽  
The World

Language contact of various kinds is the norm in Deaf communities throughout the world, and this allows for exploration of the role of the different kinds of modality (be it spoken, signed or written, or a combination of these) and the channel of communication in language contact. Drawing its evidence largely from instances of American Sign Language (ASL) this chapter addresses and illustrates several of these themes: sign-speech contact, sign-writing contact, and sign-sign contact, examining instances of borrowing and bilingualism between some of these modalities, and compares these to contact between hearing users of spoken languages, specifically in this case American English.

scholarly journals Bilingualism and bimodal code-blending among deaf ASL-English bilinguals

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Herbert ◽  
Acrisio Pires
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Mixed Language ◽  
Delayed Exposure

The audiologically deaf members of the American Deaf community display bilingual competence in American Sign Language (ASL) and English, although their language acquisition trajectories often involve delayed exposure to one or both languages. There is a great deal of variation in terms of production among these signers, ranging from very ASL-typical to productions that seem to display heavy English influence. The latter, mixed productions, coined “Contact Signing” by Lucas & Valli (1992), could be representative of a type of codeswitching, referred to as ‘code-blending’ in sign language-spoken language contexts (e.g. Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008), in which bilinguals invoke knowledge of their two grammars in concert, or these productions could be more like a mixed language, in which a third grammar, distinct from both ASL and English, constrains them. We argue, based on the analysis of our corpus of naturalistic data collected in an all-deaf sociolinguistic environment, that Contact Signing provides evidence for code-blending, given the distribution of English vs. ASL-based language properties in the production data from the participants in our study.

Developing Sign Language Measurements for Research With Deaf Populations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Henner ◽  
Robert Hoffmeister ◽  
Jeanne Reis
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Language Deprivation ◽  
Signed Language ◽  
Language Assessments ◽  
Hearing Children

Limited choices exist for assessing the signed language development of deaf and hard of hearing children. Over the past 30 years, the American Sign Language Assessment Instrument (ASLAI) has been one of the top choices for norm-referenced assessment of deaf and hard of hearing children who use American Sign Language. Signed language assessments can also be used to evaluate the effects of a phenomenon known as language deprivation, which tends to affect deaf children. They can also measure the effects of impoverished and idiosyncratic nonstandard signs and grammar used by educators of the deaf and professionals who serve the Deaf community. This chapter discusses what was learned while developing the ASLAI and provides guidelines for educators and researchers of the deaf who seek to develop their own signed language assessments.

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