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American Sign Language Commons

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Full-Text Articles in American Sign Language

Orthographic Representations In American Sign Language Fingerspelling, Zed Sehyr, Lauren Fillet, Kiana Billot-Vasquez, Emily Saunders, Karen Emmorey May 2026

Orthographic Representations In American Sign Language Fingerspelling, Zed Sehyr, Lauren Fillet, Kiana Billot-Vasquez, Emily Saunders, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

This study examined fingerspelling accuracy and error patterns in deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers and written spelling in hearing English speakers to investigate how orthographic representations are shaped by phonological, visual, and motor encoding strategies. Deaf participants (n = 39) completed a fingerspelling repetition task, while hearing participants (n = 35) completed a written dictation task using the same word and pseudoword stimuli. While overall accuracy did not differ significantly between groups, deaf participants exhibited qualitatively distinct error patterns, including higher rates of deletions and transpositions, compared to hearing participants who made more substitution errors. Deaf participants also produced …


Neural Associations Between Fingerspelling, Print, And Signs: An Erp Priming Study With Deaf Readers, Brittany Lee, Sofia E. Ortega, Priscilla M. Martinez, Katherine J. Midgley, Phillip J. Holcomb, Karen Emmorey Jul 2025

Neural Associations Between Fingerspelling, Print, And Signs: An Erp Priming Study With Deaf Readers, Brittany Lee, Sofia E. Ortega, Priscilla M. Martinez, Katherine J. Midgley, Phillip J. Holcomb, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Fingerspelling is a leading predictor of reading ability for deaf people who use a signed language, but few neuroimaging studies have examined how it supports reading. We used event-related potentials to investigate how fingerspelled words prime printed words. Twenty-four skilled deaf adult readers completed a Go/No-Go task while viewing printed English word targets following related and unrelated primes in one of three conditions: printed English words, American Sign Language (ASL) signs, and fingerspelled words. N400 priming effects were strong across all three conditions. Early N400 effects were similar for printed word primes and fingerspelled word primes, suggesting shared orthographic representations. …


Asymmetric Event-Related Potential Priming Effects Between English Letters And American Sign Language Fingerspelling Fonts, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Katherine J. Midgley, Karen Emmory, Phillip J. Holcomb Jun 2023

Asymmetric Event-Related Potential Priming Effects Between English Letters And American Sign Language Fingerspelling Fonts, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Katherine J. Midgley, Karen Emmory, Phillip J. Holcomb

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Letter recognition plays an important role in reading and follows different phases of processing, from early visual feature detection to the access of abstract letter representations. Deaf ASL–English bilinguals experience orthography in two forms: English letters and fingerspelling. However, the neurobiological nature of fingerspelling representations, and the relationship between the two orthographies, remains unexplored. We examined the temporal dynamics of single English letter and ASL fingerspelling font processing in an unmasked priming paradigm with centrally presented targets for 200 ms preceded by 100 ms primes. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants performed a probe detection task. Experiment 1 examined …