Sentence Repetition in American Sign Language

In the United States, about 90% of deaf children have parents who hear normally (Schein and Delk, 1974). The figure suggests that most deaf adults who use sign language learned it for the first time from teachers or peers in classrooms and on playgrounds rather than at home around their parent’s knees. Thus we are interested in the relationship between how old a person is when she first begins to learn a language and the fluency with which she can produce and understand that language in adulthood. Ideally we would like to describe and measure the relationship between early experience and environment in language learning. In particular, we want to understand better how sign language is learned in childhood and adulthood for both research and educational purposes. How can we distinguish among special patterns of language learning be it signed or spoken, first or second, typical, delayed or disordered? To explore the question, we designed some experiments to examine the relationship between the age at which people first learn to sign and their ability to repeat sentences in American Sign Language, ASL. Before we present and discuss the quantitative data from our first experiment, we will discuss briefly the research that led to our hypotheses. The results demonstrate that signers’ ability to repeat ASL sentences depends, in part, upon the length of time they have used sign language and thus help explain the great variation in production and comprehension skills among adult signers.