Andrew Kathy N, Hoshooley Jennifer, Joanisse Marc F
Department of Psychology and Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS One. 2014 Feb 28;9(2):e89994. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0089994. eCollection 2014.
We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into 'skilled' and 'less-skilled' signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is consistent with the theory that first language learning promotes second language through transference of linguistic elements irrespective of the transparency of mapping of grammatical structures between the two languages.
我们调查了51名年龄在7岁3个月至19岁的年轻失聪手语使用者的美国手语（ASL）与英语阅读能力之间的强相关性。根据他们在ASL的三项测试中的表现，手语使用者被分为“熟练”和“不太熟练”两组。接下来，我们使用句子与图片匹配任务评估了对四种英语句子结构（主动句、被动句、代词、反身代词）的阅读理解。我们感兴趣的是ASL熟练程度为英语词汇和句法过程奠定基础的程度。总体而言，熟练的手语使用者表现优于不太熟练的手语使用者。错误分析进一步表明，不太熟练的手语使用者在单字识别方面困难更大，其错误率更高，这表明他们无法识别句子中描述的行为者和动作。我们的研究结果表明，ASL能力的提高有助于在单词和句法层面理解英语句子。这与以下理论一致：无论两种语言之间语法结构的映射透明度如何，第一语言学习都通过语言元素的迁移来促进第二语言学习。
