Additional language (L2/Ln) research largely focuses on learners whose first languages are spoken and who are learning additional spoken languages. In the past few decades, sign languages have become increasingly popular for hearing students in schools. These students must not only learn the vocabulary and grammar of sign languages but also manage…

This study reports on strategies to indicate plural referents in hearing learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands. This is the first explorative study that focuses on L2 expressions of plurality in a sign language. Using data from two datasets, I examined when learners start to express plural and which strategies they apply, and I noted…

We investigated whether sign-naïve learners can infer and learn the meaning of signs after minimal exposure to continuous, naturalistic input in the form of a weather forecast in Swedish Sign Language. Participants were L1-English adults. Two experimental groups watched the forecast once (n = 40) or twice (n = 42); a control group did not (n =…

When learning spoken second language (L2), words overlapping in form and meaning with one's native language (L1) help break into the new language. When nonsigning speakers learn a sign language as L2, such overlaps are absent because of the modality differences (L1: speech, L2: sign). In such cases, nonsigning speakers might use iconic…

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

This study presents a corpus-based investigation of self-repairs in hearing adult L2 (M2L2, second modality and second language) learners of Swedish Sign Language ("Svenskt teckenspråk," STS). This study analyses M2L2 learners' STS conversations with a deaf signer and examines the learners' self-repair practices and whether there are…

Factors influencing native and nonnative signers' syntactic judgment ability in American Sign Language (ASL) were explored for 421 deaf students aged 7;6-18;5. Predictors for syntactic knowledge were chronological age, age of entering a school for the deaf, gender, and additional learning disabilities. Mixed-effects linear modeling analysis…

The present study implemented a sign-repetition task at two points in time to hearing adult learners of British Sign Language and explored how each phonological parameter, sign complexity, and iconicity affected sign production over an 11-week (22-hour) instructional period. The results show that training improves articulation accuracy and that…

This study explores different aspects of the mapping between phonological form and meaning of signs in British Sign Language (BSL) by means of four tasks to measure meaning recognition, form recognition, form recall, and meaning recall. The aim was to investigate whether there is a hierarchy of difficulty for these tasks and, therefore, whether…

Seeks to determine how consistently a sample of hearing mothers using simultaneous communication to their deaf children signed what they said. Data indicate that the difficulty of simulaneously signing and saying the message predisposes the mothers toward inconsistent simplification in the signed input which may or may not be helpful for language…