Representation of inflected signs from American Sign Language in short-term memory

In order to help illuminate general ways in which language users process inflected items, two groups of native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) were asked to recall lists of inflected and uninflected signs. Despite the simultaneous production of base and inflection in ASL, subjects transposed inflections across base forms, recalling the base forms in the correct serial positions, or transposed base forms, recalling the inflections in the correct serial positions. These rearrangements of morphological components within lists occurred significantly more often than did rearrangements of whole forms (base plus inflection). These and other patterns of errors converged to suggest that ASL signers remembered inflected signs componentially in terms of a base and an inflection, much as the available evidence suggests is true for users of spoken language. Componential processing of regularly inflected forms would thus seem to be independent of particular transmission systems and of particular mechanisms for combining lexical and inflectional material.