Manual Sign Translucency and Referential Concreteness in the Learning of Signs

The transmission and interpretation of manual signs consist of the sign productions and the comprehension of the referents which the signs represent. Signs are translucent to the degree that an observer can perceive a relationship between a sign and its referent. Likewise, a referent is said to be concrete or abstract, depending on whether the referent can be envisioned in a psychological image. The present study investigated sign learning as a function of sign translucency and referential concreteness. Translucency and concreteness levels were varied, and naive sign language learners attempted to learn a list of signreferent pairs. The results indicated that signs high in translucency and referents high in concreteness facilitated learning, while low levels of each variable inhibited list learning. Mixed conditions led to intermediate learning performance. Implications for choosing initial sign lexicons for severely language-impaired, non-deaf populations (e.g. the mentally retarded) are discussed.