Psycholinguistic Studies of Sign Picture Interference: Effects of Phonological and Semantic Interference on ASL Production

David P. Corina and Heather Knapp
University of Washington, Seattle

Picture naming studies support a hierarchical model of the mental lexicon in which semantic and phonological components of words are retrieved separately over time during language production. Temporal sensitivities to linguistic interference measured behaviorally during word production suggest that semantic information is retrieved prior to phonological
information. To date, all support for this model comes from hearing subjects naming objects in a spoken language. In the present behavioral study, we assess the organization of the mental lexicon in deaf signers by measuring the time-course of American Sign Language (ASL) lexical access in fluent users of ASL.

Sixteen deaf signers named common objects (e.g. Cat) that were accompanied by a superimposed image of a signer producing semantically(e.g. PIG), phonologically (e.g. STORY) or unrelated (e.g. HAMMER) ASL signs. A special device recorded reaction times as subjects to named the objects in sign. Half of the interfering sign appeared 130msec. before, the target, the remaining half appearing 130msec. after the target.

Our results indicate robust semantic facilitation at the -130 msec. SOA (p = .011), that was absent in the +130 SOA condition. Consistent, but statistically weak, phonological interference at both early and late SOA's (p = .06). These results challenge a strictly serial based model of object naming. We discuss these findings in relation to linguistic structure of ASL and properties of visual object recognition.