Fingerspelled word recognition and rapid serial visual processing in hearing adults: A study of novice and expert sign language interpreters

Fingerspelled word recognition is the single most difficult task for American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who wish to function as effective mediators of language and culture between hearing and deaf people. The current work is based on the hypothesis that rapid serial visual processing (RSVP) is one cognitive skill which plays a part in reading fingerspelled words. Fingerspelling is a rapid visual sequentially presented event. The average rate per letter is between 168 to 200 milliseconds.;A computer program was written which presents letters at high speeds (130 msec). A comparison was made between 15 novice interpreters, with less than four years experience in learning ASL, and 15 expert interpreters, who had more than four years experience. The first of two experiments had words which had at least three letters whose names were acoustically confusable with other letter names in the alphabet. The second experiment had pseudowords. In both experiments there were two conditions of presentation; fingerspelled and computerspelled. In both experiments, the word lists were 32 items long and 16 of the items were long and 16 were medium in length.;There were significant main effects for group in the confusability experiment. There were significant interactions for group by condition and group by length. The serial positions of errors of omission indicate that novices and experts differ markedly in amount of omissions. However, there was not a significant difference in the serial position of errors of omission for novices and experts.;In the pseudoword experiment there was a significant main effect for group. There were significant interaction effects for group by condition and group by type of word (pseudo or real). Experts were able to either respond with the correct pseudoword or another pseudoword, while novices never responded with the correct pseudoword. This suggests that expert's success in this, and other fingerspelled word recognition tasks, may be attributed to effective visual processing of rapidly presented visual information.