Cormier, K;
Adam, R;
Rowley, K;
Woll, B;
Atkinson, J;
(2012)
The BSL Sentence Reproduction Test: Exploring age of
acquisition effects in British deaf adults.
Presented at: Experimental studies in sign language research: Sign language workshop at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
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Abstract
Here we present initial findings from a BSL sentence reproduction test, adapted from a test originally created for ASL (Hauser et al., 2008), with the aim of creating a screen that can be used to distinguish signers with native-like vs. non-native-like skills. The stimulus items, based on a set of 49 sentences from Hauser et al. (2008), included 40 BSL sentences varying in length and complexity, presented on video by a deaf native BSL signer. Participants were instructed to copy the signed sentence to camera, exactly as they saw it, regardless of phonological or lexical variants for the same concepts that they might prefer. Participants were 20 deaf adults: 10 deaf native signers, 5 deaf early learners first exposed to BSL between ages 2 and 6, and 5 late learners first exposed to BSL at age 11 or later. Responses were scored by a team of deaf and hearing sign language researchers. Responses which were agreed by all scorers as identical to the stimulus were given a score of 1; responses which included any phonological, morphological, lexical or syntactic deviations were given a score of 0 (except for a few specific, agreed-upon acceptable deviations). Results indicate that native signers scored significantly higher than non-native signers. For non-native signers there was no significant differences between early and late learners. We explore implications of these findings for use of the BSL-SRT as a screening test for assessing fluency in deaf adults and for exploring age-of-acquisition effects more generally. Hauser, P., Paludneviciene, R., Supalla, T., & Bavelier, D. (2008). American Sign Language – Sentence Reproduction Test: Development & Implications. In R. M. d. Quadros (Ed.), Sign Languages: Spinning and Unraveling the Past, Present and Future. TISLR 9, Forty-five Papers and Three Posters from the 9th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Conference (pp. 155-167). Petrópolis/RJ. Brazil: Editora Arara Azul.
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