Orthographic representations in American Sign Language fingerspelling

This study examined fingerspelling accuracy and error patterns in deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers and written spelling in hearing English speakers to investigate how orthographic representations are shaped by phonological, visual, and motor encoding strategies. Deaf participants (n = 39) completed a fingerspelling repetition task, while hearing participants (n = 35) completed a written dictation task using the same word and pseudoword stimuli. While overall accuracy did not differ significantly between groups, deaf participants exhibited qualitatively distinct error patterns, including higher rates of deletions and transpositions, compared to hearing participants who made more substitution errors. Deaf participants also produced more pronunciation-violating errors. Notably, they showed greater accuracy in preserving geminate (double letter) segments, highlighting enhanced sensitivity to letter identity and quantity, likely supported by the explicit visual-motor representation of geminates in fingerspelling. Additionally, deaf participants showed no difference in accuracy between real words and pseudowords, indicating that fingerspelling strategies generalized beyond stored lexical forms. We interpret these findings in light of graphemic buffer constraints, motoric fluency pressures, and the structural affordances of the fingerspelling system. Visually based encoding strategies can support robust orthographic representations for those who rely less on speech-based phonological coding.