Cognitive processing demands of signed English and American Sign Language in deaf children.

摘要

This study was designed to compare two linguistic instructional media, Signed English and American Sign Language (ASL), with respect to their relative cognitive demands and effects on learning in hearing impaired students. Twenty deaf children in grades five through eight performed two simultaneous tasks, paired associate learning and fingertapping, so that the relative processing demands of Signed English and ASL could be compared. The logic for using this dual task procedure depended upon the prediction that processing of paired associates in the two media would interfere with fingertapping performance. The paired associate learning task incorporated signed elaborations of noun pairs in Signed English and ASL. Noun pairs varied according to their accessibility to relevant schematic events. Fingertapping interference was subjected to a five-way mixed analysis of variance and number of items recalled correctly to a four-way mixed analysis of variance. Results supported the hypothesis that cognitive processing demands would be greater for Signed English than for ASL. This was evidenced in two ways: by greater interference with fingertapping under the Signed English condition, and by superior recall in the ASL condition.