Visual and production similarity of the handshapes of the American manual alphabet

Two experiments were performed to examine the nature of handshape similarity for the 26 elements of the American manual alphabet. Forty deaf college students, half native (first language) signers of American Sign Language and half nonnative signers, participated in the study. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to base their judgments on visual characteristics of the shapes. In Experiment 2, they were asked to base their judgments on aspects of manual shape production. Hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses showed the two sets of judgments to be quite similar. No clear differences were found between native and nonnative signers in either experiment. These data provide a basis for the future manipulation and detection of manual coding in the processing of verbal stimuli.

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