Factors Influencing Manual Sign Learning in Hearing Adults

The effect on learning manual signs of four predictor variables was tested by learners’ ratings. The variables are translucency (perceived relationship between a sign and its referent), complexity judged as relative difficulty in producing the sign, rated concreteness of the sign referent, and frequency of occurrence of the word glossing the sign referent. The first three (translucency, complexity, and concreteness) were rated by 80 sign-naive hearing adults, who also provided the sign learning data. Frequency of the word (used to gloss the sign) was taken from Kucera & Francis (1967). Correlational analyses showed that translucency and concreteness are significant predictors of sign learning. These variables had similar effects in two different learning contexts: signs presented with semantically similar signs and with formationally similar signs. In addition, frequency was a significant predictor in the latter context. These results have implications for teaching sign language signs to hearing adults.