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Article published In:
Second Language Acquisition of Sign Languages: Acquisition d'une langue des signes comme langue seconde
Edited by Krister Schönström and Chloë Marshall
[Language, Interaction and Acquisition 13:2] 2022
► pp. 175–198

Measuring language dominance in bilinguals with two sign languages

| The University of Texas at Austin

This study examines whether a multi-faceted construct of language dominance developed for spoken languages applies to signed language bilinguals. Sign languages have been described as highly iconic and relatively similar to each other compared to spoken languages. Attaining fluency in the signed modality might well require considerably less effort, and balanced bilingualism may be more prevalent in the signed modality. Language dominance constructs, as currently understood, might differ in the spoken and signed modality. Forty bilinguals with two sign languages responded to a language dominance questionnaire developed for spoken languages and performed a phonological fluency (sign generation) task. Language dominance levels were found to vary in the signed modality. The correlation between reported dominance levels and the number of signs generated in each sign language was significant, suggesting that the construct of language dominance tested is robust and independent of modality.

Keywords: bilingualism, language dominance, acquisition, iconicity, sign language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 1.1The prospects of becoming equally fluent in two sign languages
  • 1.2A multi-faceted construct of language dominance in spoken languages
  • 1.3Phonological fluency tasks in the signed modality
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participant criteria and recruitment
    • 2.2Data collection
      • 2.2.1Language dominance questionnaire in ASL
      • 2.2.2Phonological fluency task
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Statistical models
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Results from the ASL-BLP survey
    • 3.2Correlations between the phonological fluency task and the ASL-BLP
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.22004.lin
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