Generation of Signs Within Semantic and Phonological Categories: Data from Deaf Adults and Children Who Use American Sign Language

Abstract

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks, including animals, foods, and specific handshapes. We investigated the effects of chronological age, age of sign language acquisition/years at school site, gender, presence of a disability, and geographical location (i.e., USA and Puerto Rico) on participants' performance and relations among tasks. In general, the phonological task appeared more difficult than the semantic tasks, students generated more animals than foods, age, and semantic performance correlated for the larger sample of U.S. students, and geographical variation included use of fingerspelling and specific signs. Compared to their peers, deaf students with disabilities generated fewer semantic items. These results provide an initial snapshot of students' semantic and phonological sign generation.

Semantic fluency in deaf children who use spoken and signed language in comparison with hearing peers

“…() and Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa () that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize children's semantic fluency responses in spoken languages—namely clustering of responses, the slowdown in response rate during the course of the minute, and the production of prototypical items—also characterize responses in a signed language. More cross‐linguistic work on other signed languages is needed, but studies of deaf adults who use ASL (Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa ), Portuguese Sign Language (Moita and Nunes ) and Greek Sign Language (Vletsi et al . ) reveal similar patterns of responses to those found with deaf adults who use BSL (Marshall et al .…”

“…Like Marshall et al . () for BSL, Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa () report clustering of responses around subcategories such as ‘pets’, ‘water animals’ and ‘farm animals’, and they too found an increase in productivity with age. Some of their participants had additional diagnoses of, for example, autism or mild or moderate intellectual disability, and such children performed more poorly than their typically developing deaf peers: they produced fewer correct items and made more errors (such as non‐animal signs) during the task.…”

“…For children who use a signed language, there are only two published studies to our knowledge: Marshall et al . () in British Sign Language (BSL) and Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa () in American Sign Language (ASL). Marshall et al .…”

“…Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa () employed the animal semantic fluency task in ASL with deaf children in the United States and Puerto Rico. Like Marshall et al .…”

“…Again, this pattern of findings suggests that the semantic fluency task is sensitive to language and cognitive impairments in deaf signers. However, as was the case for Marshall et al .’s () study, Beal‐Alvarez and Figueroa () did not include a hearing comparison group.…”