Which Aspects of Visual Motivation Aid the Implicit Learning of Signs at First Exposure?

Abstract

We investigated whether sign‐naïve learners can infer and learn the meaning of signs after minimal exposure to continuous, naturalistic input in the form of a weather forecast in Swedish Sign Language. Participants were L1‐English adults. Two experimental groups watched the forecast once (n = 40) or twice (n = 42); a control group did not (n = 42). Participants were then asked to assign meaning to 22 target signs. We explored predictors of meaning assignment with respect to item occurrence frequency and three facets of visual motivation: iconicity, transparency, and gesture similarity. Meaning assignment was enhanced by exposure and item frequency, thereby providing evidence for implicit language learning in a new modality, even under challenging naturalistic conditions. Accuracy was also contingent upon iconicity and transparency, but not upon gesture similarity. Meaning assignment at first exposure is thus visually motivated, although the overall low accuracy rates and further qualitative analyses suggest that visually motivated meaning assignment is not always successful.

The Role of Modality in L2 Learning: The Importance of Learners Acquiring a Second Sign Language (M2L2 and M1L2 Learners)

“…At first glance, novice signers' sensitivity to iconicity is somewhat surprising, given the long-standing finding that signs are generally not transparent to hearing nonsigners (e.g., Bellugi &Klima, 1976, andEmmorey, 2019, for ASL;Ortega et al, 2017, for the Sign Language of the Netherlands/NGT). However, recent studies have cautioned against equating iconicity with transparency (Occhino et al, 2017;Hofweber et al, 2023, in this Special Issue); while M2L2 signers are poor at guessing the meaning of isolated signs in the absence of context, their perception of which signs are iconic in a given sign language generally align quite closely with those of deaf signers fluent in that sign language (Sehyr & Emmorey, 2019). Differences in performance between the two groups potentially arise from various perceptual patterns that have since been documented for hearing nonsigners or M2L2 learners.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Learning Sign Languages as Additional Languages: Considering Language‐ and Modality‐Specific Factors

“…In the present Special Issue, Hofweber and colleagues advance work in iconicity with their study of implicit learning (Hofweber et al, 2023). In particular, they adopted a clever design to examine whether sign-naïve learners can infer and learn the meaning of signs considering various factors, such as the number of times they see a sign in context, whether a sign is judged to be iconic or transparent, and whether a sign is similar to a gesture that is used by non-signers.…”