The implications of adults understanding events conveyed in American Sign Language as a function of language status

Signed languages convey events via multiple articulators (e.g., hands, face, shoulders, and mouth), which are used to convey situational information about the characters, their goals, emotions, interactions with characters and objects, and how they occur in a spatial-temporal framework. The present study was conducted to assess the sensitivity to changes in situational dimensions (e.g., characters, goals, emotions, space-time) and low-level visual change when deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) experienced stories conveyed in ASL.

Native signers viewed videos of stories that were conveyed in ASL and engaged in an event segmentation task. A situational change score measured the number of changes in situational dimensions, and a visual change score was computed to measure the amount of changes in the movement of the signer.

The likelihood of making event segmentation judgments was positively predicted by situational change scores, but not visual change scores; nor was there an interaction between situational change and visual change scores. In contrast, a prior published study conducted the same experiment with learners of ASL and found that the relationship between situational change scores and segmentation judgments was moderated by perceptual change such that sensitivity to situational change decreased as visual change increased. A cross-experiment analysis revealed that segmentation judgments from native signers were more strongly predicted by situational change scores than learners of ASL, whereas the judgments from ASL learners were more strongly predicted by visual change scores than native signers.

These results suggest that experience with a signed language may influence how viewers attend to and integrate situational information during event comprehension and provide implications for theories of event cognition and ASL learning.