Phonological Awareness for American Sign Language

This paper examines the concept of phonological awareness (PA) as it relates to the processing of American Sign Language (ASL). We present data from a recently developed test of PA for ASL and examine whether sign language experience impacts the use of metalinguistic routines necessary for completio...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of deaf studies and deaf education 2014-10, Vol.19 (4), p.530-545
Main Authors: Corina, David P., Hafer, Sarah, Welch, Kearnan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
American sign language
Awareness
Children
Children & youth
Correlation
Correlation analysis
Deaf education
Deafness
Empirical Articles
Experience
Female
Humans
Language
Language acquisition
Language development
Linguistics
Male
Metalinguistics
Middle Aged
Persons With Hearing Impairments
Phonetics
Phonological Awareness
Phonology
Reading comprehension
Sign Language
Sound
United States
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper examines the concept of phonological awareness (PA) as it relates to the processing of American Sign Language (ASL). We present data from a recently developed test of PA for ASL and examine whether sign language experience impacts the use of metalinguistic routines necessary for completion of our task. Our data show that deaf signers exposed to ASL from infancy perform better than deaf signers exposed to ASL later in life and that this relationship remains even after controlling for the number of years of experience with a signed language. For a subset of participants, we examine the relationship between PA for ASL and performance on a PA test of English and report a positive correlation between ASL PA and English PA in native signers. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the development of reading skills in deaf children.
ISSN:1081-4159
1465-7325
DOI:10.1093/deafed/enu023