Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The effect of context on sign-recognition processes in American Sign Language (ASL) was studied by means of the gating paradigm (Grosjean, 1980). Individual signs were presented in two different conditions: a context condition in which signs were preceded by a context, and a no-context condition in which they were excised from the signing stream. A strong context effect was found: signs were isolated sooner in context, perfect confidence in the response was reached earlier, and the candidates proposed before the isolation point reflected a narrowing-in process that was both semantic and phonological. Future research in sign recognition and models of lexical access are discussed in light of these findings.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Battison, R. ( 1978). Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language (Silver Spring, Md.).

Forster, K.I. ( 1976). Accessing the mental lexicon. In R. Wales and E. Walker (eds.), New Approaches to Language Mechanisms (Amsterdam) , pp. 257-287.

Foss, D. and Blank, M. ( 1980). Identifying the speech codes. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 1-31.

Grosjean, F. ( 1980). Spoken word recognition processes and the gating paradigm . Perception and Psychophysics, 28, 267-283.

Grosjean, F. ( 1981). Sign and word recognition: A first comparison. Sign Language Studies, Fall, 195-220.

Grosjean, F. , Teuber, H. and Lane, H. ( 1978). When is a sign a sign? The on-line processing of gated signs in American Sign Language (Unpub. ms., Northeastern University).

Kirk, R.E. ( 1968). Experimental Design: Procedures for the Behavioral Sciences (Belmont, Calif.).

Marslen-Wilson, W. and Tyler, L. ( 1980). The temporal structure of spoken language understanding . Cognition, 8, 1-71.

Marslen-Wilson, W. and Welsh, A. ( 1978). Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology , 10, 29-63.

10.

Morton, J. ( 1969). Interaction of information in word recognition . Psychological Review, 76, 165-178.

11.

Morton, J. and Long, J. ( 1976). Effect of word transitional probability on phoneme identification . Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior , 15, 43-51.

12.

Ohman, S. ( 1966). Perception of segments of VCCV utterances. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 40, 979-988.

13.

Pollack I. and Pickett, J. ( 1963). The intelligibility of excerpts from conversation . Language and Speech, 6, 165-171.

14.

Schuberth, R. and Eimas, P. ( 1977). Effects of context on the classification of words and non words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 27-36.

15.

Stokoe, W. ( 1960). Sign Language Structure [= Studies in Linguistics: Occasional Papers, 8] , revised 1978 (Silver Spring, Md.).

16.

Stokoe, W. , Casterline, D. and Croneberg, C. ( 1976). A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, 2nd ed. (Silver Spring, Md.).

17.

Studdert-Kennedy, M. and Lane, H. ( 1980). Clues from the differences between signed and spoken language. In U. Bellugi and M. Studdert-Kennedy (eds.), Signed and Spoken Language: Biological Constraints on Linguistic Form (Deerfield, Fla.), pp. 29-40.

Sign Recognition Processes in American Sign Language: the Effect of Context

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References