Second-language learners of American Sign Language (ASL) often struggle in the acquisition of more complex ASL aspects, such as role shift, constructed action, and eye gaze to represent characters and their actions with narratives. These learners also often overestimate their ASL skill level. This study investigated errors in second modality,…

Factors influencing native and nonnative signers' syntactic judgment ability in American Sign Language (ASL) were explored for 421 deaf students aged 7;6-18;5. Predictors for syntactic knowledge were chronological age, age of entering a school for the deaf, gender, and additional learning disabilities. Mixed-effects linear modeling analysis…

Self-assessment is an emerging topic in ASL/English interpreter education that is being recognized as critical for students completing the degree-to-certification process and needs to be thoroughly explored. Using Scaffolding Theory and self-assessment drawn from Self-Directed Learning Theory, this exploratory, qualitative interview study…

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to…

This article reports the results of the first longitudinal study that systematically investigates the acquisition of verb agreement by hearing learners of a sign language. During a 2-year period, 14 novel learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) with a spoken language background performed an elicitation task 15 times. Seven deaf native…

In the present study we aimed to investigate phonological substitution errors made by hearing second language (M2L2) learners of American Sign Language (ASL) during a sentence translation task. Learners saw sentences in ASL that were signed by either a native signer or a M2L2 learner. Learners were to simply translate the sentence from ASL to…

Although the literature on general characteristics of effective sign language teaching is growing, relatively few studies have looked in detail at classroom practices or classroom discourse. This article draws on detailed observations of six beginner Australian Sign Language (Auslan) classes and postclass interviews with the teachers in order to…

This article argues for the necessity of phonetic analysis in signed language linguistics and presents a case study of one analytical system being used in a preliminary attempt to identify natural classes and investigate variation in ASL handshapes. Robbin Battison (1978) first described what is now a widely accepted list of basic handshapes,…

Bilinguals report more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) failures than monolinguals. Three accounts of this disadvantage are that bilinguals experience between-language interference at (a) semantic and/or (b) phonological levels, or (c) that bilinguals use each language less frequently than monolinguals. Bilinguals who speak one language and sign another…