Hearing L2 Sign Language Learners: How Do They Perform on ASL Phonological Fluency?

Abstract

Currently researchers and university professors have limited evidence related to how typically hearing adult learners acquire American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language. We investigated university interpreting and deaf education majors’ fluency using an ASL phonological sign generation task in which participants produce signs related to three given handshapes within one minute each. Candidates completed this task at the end of their ASL IV course; a subgroup also completed the task a second time one year later for a longitudinal comparison of their performance. We investigated the effects of major, age, years of signing experience, self-reported hours of ASL use, and self-rating of ASL proficiency. Those with less sign language experience performed lower than deaf high school (Beal-Alvarez and Figueroa 2017) and university students (Morere, Witkin, and Murphy 2012), while those with more than three years of ASL experience performed similarly to the deaf students. Longitudinal candidates’ mean performance increased by five items, although this was not significant. Our findings show that typically hearing university ASL learners require many years of experience to perform similarly to more proficient deaf signers.