Abstract:Currently researchers and university professors have limited evidence related to how typically hearing adult learners acquire American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language. We investigated university interpreting and deaf education majors’ fluency using an ASL phonological sign generation task in which participants produce signs related to three given handshapes within one minute each. Candidates completed this task at the end of their ASL IV course; a subgroup also completed the task a second time one year later for a longitudinal comparison of their performance. We investigated the effects of major, age, years of signing experience, self-reported hours of ASL use, and self-rating of ASL proficiency. Those with less sign language experience performed lower than deaf high school (Beal-Alvarez and Figueroa 2017) and university students (Morere, Witkin, and Murphy 2012), while those with more than three years of ASL experience performed similarly to the deaf students. Longitudinal candidates’ mean performance increased by five items, although this was not significant. Our findings show that typically hearing university ASL learners require many years of experience to perform similarly to more proficient deaf signers.

中文翻译：

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听力 L2 手语学习者：他们在 ASL 语音流利度上的表现如何？

摘要：目前，研究人员和大学教授关于听力成人学习者如何将美国手语 (ASL) 作为第二语言习得的证据有限。我们使用 ASL 语音符号生成任务调查了大学口译和聋教育专业学生的流利程度，参与者在每个 1 分钟内生成与三个给定手形相关的符号。考生在 ASL IV 课程结束时完成了这项任务；一年后，一个小组还第二次完成了这项任务，以纵向比较他们的表现。我们调查了专业、年龄、手语经验年限、自我报告的 ASL 使用时间和 ASL 熟练程度的自我评价的影响。手语经验较少的学生表现低于聋人高中（Beal-Alvarez 和 Figueroa 2017）和大学生（Morere、Witkin 和 Murphy 2012），而具有三年以上 ASL 经验的学生表现与聋学生相似。纵向候选人的平均表现提高了五个项目，尽管这并不显着。我们的研究结果表明，听力正常的大学 ASL 学习者需要多年的经验才能与更熟练的聋人手语者相似。