Phonological Awareness for American Sign Language

This paper examines the concept of phonological awareness (PA) as it relates to the processing of American Sign Language (ASL). We present data from a recently developed test of PA for ASL and examine whether sign language experience impacts the use of metalinguistic routines necessary for completion of our task. Our data show that deaf signers exposed to ASL from infancy perform better than deaf signers exposed to ASL later in life and that this relationship remains even after controlling for the number of years of experience with a signed language. For a subset of participants, we examine the relationship between PA for ASL and performance on a PA test of English and report a positive correlation between ASL PA and English PA in native signers. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the development of reading skills in deaf children.