Three groups of subjects differing in age, language experience, and familiarity with American Sign Language were compared on three tasks regarding the perception of iconicity in signs from American Sign Language. Subjects were asked to guess the meaning of signs, to rate signs for iconicity, and to state connections between signs and their meaning in English. Results showed that hearing college students, deaf adults, and hearing first-grade children perform similarly on tasks regarding iconicity. Results suggest a psycholinguistic definition of iconicity based on association values, rather than physical resemblances between signs and real-world referents.
This paper explores the operational and conceptual meanings of the iconicity of manual signs and sign languages, by contrasting aspects of iconicity with parallel facets of stimulus meaningfulness in the Paired-Associates (PA) rote verbal learning literature. Historical, conceptual, and theoretical aspects of iconicity related to language systems in general and American Sign Language (ASL) in particular are treated in Section 1. Section 2 describes empirical studies related to operational definition of iconicity in ASL signs, and addresses the issues and implications of this literature. Section 3 describes parallels between iconicity and stimulus meaningfulness and the implications of these parallels for the scientific status of iconicity and of research related to the role of iconicity in sign language systems.
Article Descriptors deaf-blind; iconicity; sign language; blind; language learn ing; tactile perceptionSigns selected from lists used in studies with men tally retarded and autistic children and previously rated for visual iconicity were presented tactilely to 13 blind persons.Visual and tactile ratings were found to be very similar across blind, deaf, and hearing-sighted adults, and hearing-sighted children. Findings suggest that developmental language theory can account not only for the similarity in subjects' responses, but also for the particular signs that are most likely to be perceived as iconic. Sign rankings are provided, in dicating the signs that should be most salient to deafblind children.
One hundred American Sign Language signs selected from sign vocabularies used with mentally retarded persons were rated for iconicity by 20 college students, 12 deaf adults, and 20 first-graders. A Pearson Product-Moment correlation showed that ratings tended to be highly similar for the three groups. Classification of signs based on ratings by each group, however, showed that perceptions of iconicity were not identical across the groups. Deaf subjects rated more items as iconic than did hearing groups. Hearing subjects rated about one-half of the signs as noniconic. Results suggest that sign ratings for iconicity will be helpful for teachers in determining which signs will be most easily acquired by retarded learners. Findings also suggest that factors other than iconicity contribute to the ease of sign acquisition in nonverbal retarded learners.
Signs selected from lists used in studies with mentally retarded and autistic children and previously rated for visual iconicity were presented tactilely to 13 blind persons. Visual and tactile ratings were found to be very similar across blind and sighted groups. Statements of relationship between signs and their meanings were also found to be very similar for blind and sighted groups, suggesting that signs easily learned through the visual channel will be the most easily learned through the tactile channel. Teaching strategies were suggested by blind participants for use with deaf-blind children. Sign rankings for iconicity and relationships between signs and their meanings are provided.
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