A comparison of Taiwanese sign language and manually coded Chinese: word length and short-term memory capacity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0036/000095Keywords:
Taiwanese sign language, manually coded ChineseAbstract
Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) is the natural language among deaf communities in Taiwan. Manually Coded Chinese (MCC) is the official instructional language. Previous studies have shown that deaf students have great difficulty in comprehending stories in MCC, plausibly due to greater word length in MCC, which in turn may impair recall of MCC words. In Study I, deaf and hearing signers produced signs for 100 words in both MCC and TSL, and the word length was calculated for each sign pair. It was found that MCC words were greater in length than TSL words, whether produced by a hearing or a deaf signer. In Study II, the short-term memory capacity in deaf signers was compared between word lists in TSL and in MCC. The participants were 44 senior high students in a school for the deaf and 20 deaf adults. The results showed that for both deaf students and adults, the short-term memory capacity was inferior for the MCC list than for the TSL list, confirming our hypothesis.
References
Supalla, S. 1991. Manually coded English: The modality question in signed language development. In P. Siple, and S. Fischer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in sign language research: Acquisition (pp. 85-109). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hoffmeister, R. J. 2000. A piece of the puzzle: ASL and reading comprehension in deaf children. In C. Chamberlain, J. P. Morford, and R. I. Mayberry (Eds.), Language acquisition by eye (pp. 143-164). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Hsiu-Tan Liu (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
