A year ago I began to learn American Sign Language (ASL), in order to be able to engage more effectively with the Deaf community. Language learning has always interested me, and every language broadens one’s potential experience in new ways. Sign language, being visual rather than verbal, brings new challenges to language processing, as well as a new way of understanding the abstraction that is language.
I’m used to learning easily, but throughout this year of taking courses I have struggled to keep up, and consistently being given “barely pass” marks. A primary reason for this is that I have found it extremely difficult to learn vocabulary. That’s challenging with any language and requires an amount of time spent on memorization. In the case of sign, the vocabulary is not auditory or written, but visual. When I hear a new word, I can usually repeat it, but when I see a new word in sign, I can’t seem to store it away. It seemed to me that other students could pick up words quickly when shown once or twice, like I would in a spoken language, but in sign I was well behind the class in this aspect.
I hypothesized that this difficulty connects to aphantasia, which impacts my ability to recognize and imitate what I see. In ASL, signs consist of combinations of hand shapes and position, orientation, rotation, movement, and touch with parts of the body. I can understand and remember a sign semantically as a combination of those characteristics, but it is very difficult to work that out visually on the spot.
What I needed was a scaffold to help me overcome the challenge of understanding and remembering vocabulary. In other languages, verbal and written instruction usually happen together, but ASL is taught visually without much written representation. Since I wanted to be able to note for myself in some efficient way what details I needed to know about a given sign, I searched online for information about forms of written sign language.
The resource that was most helpful to me is SignWriting. This is an invented writing system that encodes the various types of information needed to describe a sign fully. A small set of base symbols combine to show hand and finger position, rotation, and movement, and other symbols address the rest of the body. The base symbol set is small and easy to learn, and combines into full sign glyphs somewhat like how letters combine into words. The example here says, in ASL, "SignWriting helps me learn ASL".
This was the support I needed to be able to remember and recognize signs. The SignWriting system deconstructs the components of sign language and organizes them in a way I was quickly able to understand. I could cross check the written representation with video representations (often played in slow motion or even frame by frame). In this way, my early learning of ASL and SignWriting took place simultaneously and each supported the other.
Once I discovered this scaffold, I developed a personal vocabulary list of ASL signs in SignWriting with English glosses. I would use this list to review terms, both to remember their meanings, but also to practice making and recognizing them. This tool also helped me learn to differentiate “confusable” signs, which look nearly identical but mean very different things. And although it is difficult to write by hand quickly, I sometimes could use a simplified form to take notes when the teacher corrected me.
For a while, the work of learning SignWriting on top of my class obligations and catching up with my vocabulary list was a lot extra. But that paid off as I began to remember more signs and then to recognize them more quickly. Nowadays I mainly use it to support more novel or complex signs. In part this tells me that the scaffold has done its job, and got me to the point where I no longer need it anymore. Of course, so far this just means I was able to maintain my “barely passing” mark, and I still need to catch up before continuing my studies, so I’ve paused my courses.
This experience has made me enthusiastic about written sign language as a medium. I do not yet have enough knowledge of the Deaf community to speak to the issues around adoption of written sign language. My personal experience is that it brought great educational benefit, and I think that could be the case for many learners. It’s an interesting subject, and I look forward to exploring more how a resource like this can help address other needs as well.
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