| Adult Onset Hearing Loss (AOHL) is a newly developing field of interdisciplinary study. Social, political, cultural, and communication concerns related to AOHL are briefly described as part of the study and reviewed from the author's perspective of one with AOHL. The research undertaken focuses on one sub-area of AOHL: Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The research investigates how hearing adults mentally represent American Sign language (ASL) in the initial learning period. The research tests the hypothesis that the acquisition of a visual second language, ASL, requires similar a mental processing as is required in the acquisition of a second oral-aural language, English. The research methodology employs current theory and models from the field of SLA.; Two normative studies and the experiment proper were designed to test the working memory processes acquired when novice learners are first exposed to a limited number of ASL signs and their English translations. Normative Study 1 tests a set of signs for iconicity to select a normative set of signs for subsequent use. Normative Study 2 generates a set of semantically related English words paired with each of the signs selected in Normative Study 1. In the experiment proper, 48 participants "learned" pairs of sign-English word translations. Subsequently, when presented with deliberately distracting words (foils), the participants engaged in a translation recognition task. Foils were phonologically related to the true translations, or semantically related, or completely unrelated. According to SLA theory, slower response times in performing the recognition task when presented with the foils indicates that participants automatically encode various features of the sign-word combinations in the initial learning phase. The experiment proper indicates that adults naive to ASL encode the English translations of ASL in a similar way to how bilinguals' encode spoken words in first acquiring a spoken second language.; The future implications of the research include exploring methodologies for teaching ASL to hearing adults and to adults with AOHL. In addition to contributions to pedagogy, and to social, political, and cultural questions related to AOHL, other implications for further research can be located in bilingual studies of language representation linking aural language with visual-spatial language. |
