Assessing American Sign Language

Abstract

This chapter presents an historical account of the progress in the development of measures for assessing first language abilities in American Sign Language (ASL). In the past sign language assessment efforts were limited as they were largely based on the translation of extant measures developed for assessing English abilities. In the past two decades, the growing understanding of the linguistic properties of ASL and other signed languages and of language assessment in general has paved the way for significant progress in developing assessments for ASL and other signed languages. In order to provide a complete picture of a child's language abilities and knowledge, it is necessary that assessments include both receptive and expressive components. Such components must take into consideration vocabulary knowledge (both its extent and depth) as well as phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic knowledge. Because ASL exists in the visual modality and does not have a written form, the optimal presentation mode of any ASL assessment instrument must be video based. It is important that the material used to carry out language assessment is in a recorded format such that the test taker is not subject to memory constraints that may compromise language performance. While this chapter focuses on assessments of ASL, many points about ASL assessment can and should be extrapolated to what we should think about for assessments of other signed languages. Furthermore, this chapter also emphasizes that it is important for the purpose of developing assessment to be cognizant of the modality difference between signed and spoken languages. Language takes advantage of the affordances given to it by its modality, but these differences disappear when one is attuned to the deeper levels of meaning. Developing signed language assessments based on known linguistic structures will allow us to gain the clearest picture of the language knowledge and abilities of Deaf children.

The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language

“…The signs in ASL-LEX originated from several resources: previous published databases ( Mayberry et al., 2014 ; Vinson et al., 2008 ), the ASL Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) ( Anderson & Reilly, 2002 ; Caselli, Lieberman, & Pyers, 2020 ), an ASL vocabulary test ( Hoffmeister, 1999 ; Novogrodsky, Caldwell-Harris, Fish, & Hoffmeister, 2014 ), ASL Signbank ( Hochgesang, Crasborn, & Lillo-Martin, 2019 ), and from previous in-house psycholinguistic experiments ( Meade, Lee, Midgley, Holcomb, & Emmorey, 2018 ).…”