WHEN A WORD IS NOT THE SUM OF ITS LETTERS: FINGERSPELLING AND ...

WHEN A WORD IS NOT THE SUM OF ITS LETTERS: FINGERSPELLING AND SPELLING*

Vicki L. Hanson

Abstract. In an experiment examlnlng reading of fingerspelling. deaf signers of American Sign Language were asked to view fingerspelled words and nonwords. They then wrote the letters of the item just presented and made a judgment as to whether the item was a word

or nonword. There was a large difference in ability to report the letters of words and nonwords. The letters of words tended to be accurately reported. while the letters of nonwords were much less

accurately reported. Results indicated that these deaf subjects did not read fingerspelled words as individual letters. Rather. subjects made use of the underlying structure of words. Misspellings

of words in this task and from free writing of deaf adults demonstrated a productive knowledge of English word structure. with striking similarities in error pattern being found from these two sources.

INTRODUCTION

Fingerspelling is a manual communication system in which there is a manual sign for each letter of the alphabet. Words are spelled out in this system. Fingerspelling is an important part of American Sign Language (ASL) as well as an integral part of manual systems based on English. As such. it is important to understand how fingerspelled words are processed by skilled users of the system. For this reason. an experiment was designed to examine the following questions: How are fingerspelled words read? Is reading words a letter- by-letter process of recognition? That is. is it necessary to

*This paper will appear in Proceedings of the 3rd National Symposium ~ Sign Language Research and Teaching. Acknowledgment. This work would not have been possible without the help of

many people. First. I would like to thank Carol Padden for her fingerspelling expertise. as well as Nancy Frishberg and Dennis Schemenauer for making arrangements for people to participate in the experiment. I am also grateful to all the subjects who participated in this experiment. This manuscript has

benefi ted significantly from comments by Ursula Bellugi. Ed Klima. Donald Shankweiler. and Craig Will. Special thanks to John Richards for his many contributions to the paper. This research was supported by National Insti-

tutes of Health Research Service Award #1 F32 NS06109-02 from the Division of Neurosciences and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and by National Institute of Education Grant #NIE-G-80-0178.

[HASKINS LABORATORIES: Status Report on Speech Research SR-65 (1981)J

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identify each letter of the word? recognition of letter groupings? reading fingerspelling?

Or, rather, when reading words is there And what kinds of errors are made when

METHOD

Sixty fingerspelled items were presented, one at a time. Thirty were real words ranging in length from five to thirteen letters. Mean length was 8.3 letters per word. The following words were used: ADVERTISEMENT, AWKWARDLY, BANKRUPTCY, BAPTIZE, CADILLAC, CAREFUL, CHIMNEY, COMMUNICATE, ELABORATE, FUNERAL, GRADUATE, HELICOPTER, HEMISPHERE, INTERRUPT, MOUNTAIN, PANTOMIME, PHILADELPHIA, PHYSICS, PREGNANT, PSYCHOLOGICAL, PUMPKIN, RHYTHM, SUBMARINE, SURGERY, THIRD, TOMATO, UMBRELLA, VEHICLE, VIDEO, VINEGAR. These thirty words were matched for average length with 30 nonwords. Twenty of these matched nonwords were pseudowords. Pseudowords were pronounceable, but they do not happen to be English words. The following pseudowords were used: BRANDIGAN, CADERMELTON, CHIGGETH, COSMERTRAN, EAGLUMATE, FREZNIK, FRUMHENSER, HANNERBAD, INVENCHIP, MUNGRATS, PHALTERNOPE, PILTERN, PINCKMOR, PRECKUM, RAPAS, SNERGLIN, STILCHUNING, SWITZEL, VALETOR, VISTARMS. The other ten nonwords were not possible English words. These orthographically impossible words were not pronounceable. The impossible words were as follows: CONKZMER, ENGKSTERN, FTERNAPS, HSPERACH, PGANTERLH, PIGTLANING, PKANT, RANGKPES, RICGH, VETMFTERN.

Stimulus words were recorded on videotape by a native ASL signer. Items were fingerspelled at a natural ASL rate of 354 letters per minute (see Bornstein, 1965). While words were fingerspelled at a slightly faster rat~ than nonwords, this difference in rate between words (mean rate of 369 letters per minute) and nonwords (mean rate of 339 letters per minute) was not

statistically significant, t(58)=1.87, p > .05. Real words, pseudowords, and

impossible words were mixed throughout the list with each item followed by a 10 second blank interval to be used as a response period. Subj ects were instructed that they would see many fingerspelled items and that for every item they were to do two things: First, write the letters they had just seen, and second, make a judgment as to whether that item was a word or nonword. The instructions, signed in ASL by the same person who fingerspelled the stimuli, were recorded on Videotape.

Subjects were 17 congenitally deaf adults recruited through New York University and California State University, Northridge. Fifteen were native signers of ASL. The other two had learned ASL at age five and were considered by native signers to be fluent in ASL. There were eight men and nine women ranging in age from 17-53 years, mean age 31 years.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Responses were analyzed for accuracy of letter report and correctness of word judgments. Shown in the first line of Table 1 are percentages of subjects' correct responses in the three conditions. These were trials on which both the letter report and word judgment decisions were correct. As can readily be seen, there were large performance differences for words, pseudowords, and impossible words.

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Table 1

Mean percentage of items correct in the three conditions.

Words Pseudowords Impossible words

Total correct responses

61.0%

25.0%

11 .2%

Correct word judgments

92.9%

83.5%

82.9%

Correct spelling following correct word judgment

62.9%

28.1 %

12.9%

Response Accuracy

There are two possible sources of error in this experiment: recognition and letter report. It is possible that subjects recognized all the letters of

an item correctly but later were unable to report the letters. Bearing on this issue, it is important to take note of the fact that subjects were accurate at making decisions as to whether a fingerspelled item was a word or

nonword. As shown in Table 1, when words were presented, subjects correctly indicated that item was a word on more than 90% of the trials. The analysis of accuracy across conditions indicated, however, that accuracy was not constant across all stimulus types, F(2,32)=3.84, prangkes. These incorrect responses indicate a productive knowledge of English word structure.

Table 2

Classification of errors for the incorrect responses.

Words

Pseudowords

Impossible words

Errors consistent with English orthography

76.8%

71 .9%

60.4%

Phonetic misspellings

16.5%

(3.4%)

Phonetic misspellings. Did the misspellings of the English words preserve the pronunciation of the words presented? The majority did not. Errors that are pronunciation preserving may be called phonetic misspellings. Examples of common phonetic misspellings for hearing people are analisis (for analysis), bankrupcy (for bankruptcf)' catagory (for category), and vidio (for video) (Masters, 1927; Sears, 1969. As shown in Table 2, only about 16% of the incorrect spellings for the English words in this experiment were

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