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Initiatives & Projectsproject 21 -- Behavioral studies of phonological awareness in ASLLCF 1: Behavioral studies of phonological awareness in American Sign Language (Corina):
The term “phonological awareness” is normally used to refer to a person’s awareness of, and ability to distinguish between, the sounds of spoken language. But in our project we use the term to refer to deaf ASL users’ awareness of the elemental building blocks of signs, such as handshape, location, and movement. We hypothesize that the development of phonological awareness in sign language serves to promote the acquisition of reading in English. In order for that to happen, language segmentation and manipulation skills in one linguistic domain would have to be transferable to another. To test that hypothesis we are quantifying the degree to which deaf signers treat signs as segmentable forms rather than as un-analyzable wholes, and examining how that ability is related to success in reading. Our lab testing consists of having school-aged children and adults watch video-based sign segmentation and “rhyming” tasks while their reaction times and accuracy are measured. Related Initiatives:
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