Lexical Recognition in Deaf Children Learning American Sign Language: Activation of Semantic and Phonological Features of Signs

Abstract

Children learning language efficiently process single words and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual–spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native or early‐exposed signing deaf children (ages 4 to 8 years) participated in a visual world eye‐tracking study. Participants were presented with a single ASL sign, target picture, and three competitor pictures that varied in their phonological and semantic relationship to the target. Participants shifted gaze to the target picture shortly after sign offset. Participants showed robust evidence for activation of semantic but not phonological features of signs. However, in their behavioral responses, participants were most susceptible to phonological competitors. Results demonstrated that single word recognition in ASL is largely parallel to spoken language recognition among children who are developing a mature lexicon.

Flexible fast‐mapping: Deaf children dynamically allocate visual attention to learn novel words in American Sign Language

“…While fast‐mapping is a known and robust phenomenon among children learning spoken language (Bion et al., 2013; Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Halberda, 2003; Horst & Samuelson, 2008), the current study is the first to our knowledge to demonstrate that children can rapidly map and retain word meanings, irrespective of the sensory modality of linguistic input. Across both experiments, there were increased fixations to the target picture relative to the distractor picture at test, both in a sign recognition window that has been established in previous studies of sign recognition in deaf children (Lieberman & Borovsky, 2020; MacDonald et al., 2018), as well as in a later window. The late window provided more robust target fixations in Experiment 2, which likely reflects the more difficult nature of the task relative to Experiment 1.…”

“…Children generally fixated the sign video until approximately 600 ms following sign onset, and then shifted gaze to the target picture. Following convention from previous studies of ASL lexical recognition (Lieberman & Borovsky, 2020; MacDonald et al., 2018), we analyzed looks from 600 to 2500 ms following sign onset, which we call the sign recognition window. However, given that recognition of novel signs is a more difficult task than recognition of familiar signs and thus often occurs later in the timecourse (Bion et al., 2013; Booth & Waxman, 2009; Borovsky et al., 2016; Houston‐Price et al., 2010; Mather & Plunkett, 2010), we analyzed a second, late window, from 2500 to 3500 ms following sign offset.…”

“…All analyses were done using R Verison 3.6.2 (R Core Team, 2019), with the lme4 (Bates While we present data visualizations as fixation proportions, prior to analyzing fixations we first calculate log-gaze transformations, which address specific limitations of raw proportions: first, raw proportions are not linearly independent (i.e., greater looks to one AOI means fewer looks to other AOIs); second, as raw proportions are fixed between zero and one, they violate homogeneity of variance assumptions. This approach has been used in our prior eye-movement studies with both hearing (Borovsky, 2020;Borovsky et al, 2016) and deaf (Lieberman & Borovsky, 2020;Wienholz & Lieberman, 2019) children.…”

Examining speech-based phonological recoding during reading for adolescent deaf signers.

“…A small set of studies have leveraged eye-tracking to investigate language use in deaf signers, including investigations of sign language narrative viewing (Bosworth & Stone, 2021), visual world paradigms targeting comprehension of sign, speech, and sign-supported speech (A. M. Lieberman & Borovsky, 2020; A.…”

Lexical access in bimodal bilinguals

“…The second experiment adapts the visual world paradigm to a signed language scenario by presenting the linguistic stimulus as a video of a sign to study the time course of co-activation of location and handshape. This experiment will also be a means of testing whether the paradigm can be adapted for sign language with competition from a single sub-lexical unit (combined sub-lexical units have been used with the visual world paradigm in Lieberman & Borovsky, 2020;Lieberman et al, 2015;Thompson et al, 2013).…”