Learning to Fingerspell Twice: Young Signing Children’s Acquisition of Fingerspelling
Learning to Fingerspell Twice: Young Signing Children’s Acquisition of Fingerspelling
This chapter reviews recent studies of fingerspelling in American Sign Language (ASL), including those that discuss how young signers begin to construct fingerspelled words. These descriptions of early fingerspelling show that acquiring fingerspelling in ASL involves two sets of skills: first, the child learns to recognize fingerspelled words as whole units, and then, when reading and writing English become more prominent in the child’s life, the child begins to understand fingerspelled words as made up of hand shapes which correspond to the letters of the alphabet. In the latter sense, the child learns fingerspelling a second time — this time in terms of its internal composition and its link to English words in their written form. The chapter concludes by addressing some implications of this pattern of acquisition of fingerspelling for the early education of young deaf children.
Keywords: American Sign Language, fingerspelling, young signers
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
