American Sign Language basic clause comprehension strategies used by late first-language learners: Plausibility, animacy, and linguistic structure.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Level 4 by design analogy (small non-clinical experimental case series).
PubMed 41114044 · doi:10.1080/15475441.2025.2524820
What was done
Nine deaf individuals who experienced severely delayed first-language (L1) acquisition completed a sentence-picture matching task in American Sign Language (ASL). The experimental stimuli varied systematically across linguistic structure (noun-attribute, spatial classifier, and transitive sentences), semantic plausibility, and noun animacy to evaluate whether late learners rely primarily on linguistic structure or extra-linguistic cues to comprehend basic clauses.
What was found
The abstract reports no exact percentages, accuracy scores, or test statistics. Late L1 signers generally relied on linguistic cues to interpret noun-attribute and spatial classifier sentences even when the meaning was implausible. In implausible and irreversible transitive sentences, signers maintained high overall accuracy using word order, but this processing became fragile and compromised when animacy cues conflicted with word order.
Why it matters
These findings suggest that individuals with severely delayed first-language acquisition develop graded, vulnerable syntactic representations, exhibiting cue-competition strategies similar to those of young children during early language acquisition.
Limits
The study is limited by an extremely small sample size (n = 9). The abstract provides no numerical data, confidence intervals, or effect sizes, and does not report a concurrent native or early-signing control group. Details regarding the exact age of L1 onset, language exposure duration, and testing conditions are omitted from the abstract.
Cited by
- partial If a child does not acquire language during the first several years of life, they can never acquire the fundamental concept of language.