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In two studies, we find that native and non-native acquisition show different effects on sign language processing. Subjects were all born deaf and used sign language for interpersonal communication, but first acquired it at ages ranging from birth to 18. In the first study, deaf signers shadowed (simultaneously watched and reproduced) sign language narratives given in two dialects, American Sign Language (ASL) and Pidgin Sign English (PSE), in both good and poor viewing conditions. In the second study, deaf signers recalled and shadowed grammatical and ungrammatical ASL sentences. In comparison with non-native signers, natives were more accurate, comprehended better, and made different kinds of lexical changes; natives primarily changed signs in relation to sign meaning independent of the phonological characteristics of the stimulus. In contrast, non-native signers primarily changed signs in relation to the phonological characteristics of the stimulus independent oflexical and sentential meaning. Semantic lexical changes were positively correlated to processing accuracy and comprehension, whereas phonological lexical changes were negatively correlated. The effects of non-native acquisition were similar across variations in the sign dialect, viewing condition, and processing task. The results suggest that native signers process lexical structure automatically, such that they can attend to and remember lexical and sentential meaning. In contrast, non-native signers appear to allocate more attention to the task of identifying phonological shape such that they have less attention available for retrieval and memory of lexical meaning.Recent research has uncovered numerous linguistic and psychological parallels between speech and sign language. These striking similarities demonstrate that the process of deriving meaning from linguistic form is very abstract. Changing the peripheral sensory and motor channel of language expression and comprehension from audition and oral articulation to vision and manual articulation does not appear to alter the basic way in which language is processed (Grosjean, 1980;Poizner, Klima, & Bellugi, 1987;Siple, 1982). However, the recent discoveries about sign language characterize the processing of the most

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This paper presents observations and analyses of the expression of negation in Chinese Sign Language (CSL), based on interviews with 15 Chinese Deaf adults in Beijing, China. Findings show that while some aspects of negation in CSL (e.g. nonmanual signals, negative signs, and structures of negative sentences) are similar to those found in other sign languages, CSL displays some unique features. One is a negative handshape, phonetically equivalent to the fingerspelled letter i in ASL. It also seems that a horizontal handwave and a side-to-side headshake have equivalent negative force, but the two cannot be used simultaneously. The structures of negative words and sentences show that CSL has a unique grammatical system that forces us to rethink some of our assumptions about sign language negation.

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