Recall thatThoryk(2010) assessed the efficacy of a curriculum designed to improve fingerspelling comprehension but that her study involved testing students who had the training versus those who had no additional training. Had she found a positive effect of the training without a control group, it would have been possible to argue that it was not the training itself that caused the improvement but rather the increase in time spent on a fingerspelling task. For this reason, in the present study, it was desirable to have an implicit training to serve as a control. This way all students, regardless of which training they receive, will have extra and, importantly, equal, time on a fingerspelling task. A positive result in the training studies then means it is a result of explicit training and not an artifact of having more time interacting with a fingerspelling task.
Students in the control group received training in fingerspelling, but crucially, this training did not bring their attention to the types of segments in fingerspelling nor to the fact that fingerspelled items can take on a specific shape, particularly when certain and frequent bigrams are present. A specific rule was not explained to participants, nor could they infer one based on the trainingDekeyser(2003).
The control group’s training focused on prescriptively correct formation of the citation form of each of the letters in the manual alphabet, which students all learned at the start of their ASL classes. This training included still images of each of the manual letters, except for -j- and -z-, which were presented with short video clips since their production involves movement. In addition, participants were reminded that while most letters are produced with the palm facing away from them, there are some exceptions to this generalization. Their training included images of two angles of letters produced with non-default palm orientation; these are presented in Figure3.13.
Figure 3.13: Still images of the letters -g-, -h-, -p-, and -q-. Unlike the majority of fingerspelled letters, these are not produced with the palm facing outward. For each letter, the images alternate between a front (from the view of the perceiver) and side views. It should be noted that in some dialects of ASL, productions of -g- and -h-with a a neutral or slightly extended wrist (orientation in which the index finger points away from the signer and the back of the thumb faces the signer’s midline) are acceptable, but this variant is uncommon in Texas where these students are learning.
Students completed the review of fingerspelling production with much of the same media content as the explicit training group however, they remained naïve to the structure of, and types of coarticulation in fingerspelling, which was the focus of the explicit training. For example, all of the same videos included in the explicit training also appear in the implicit training, but students are not asked to attend to one particular aspect of the video. An example of differences in how the same media is presented in the two trainings is presented in Table 3.6. The training concluded with reminders of how to produce double letters in fingerspelling, following Smith
et al.(2008) and that fingerspelling should be produced smoothly and without jerking movements. This training lasted approximately 30-40 minutes.
Explicit Implicit
Slide 13 -y-
•The letter -y-, when produced in isola- tion, has normal orientation and bend- ing at the wrist.
•But, often times, when it’s in the mid- dle or end of a word, signers will add a bend at the wrist to help this letter stand out.
•Let’s look at some examples
Slide 14 Slide 23
-y- Here are some other words
word final/internal: boy/himalaya
word final: yosemite
Slide 15 Slide 24
[video of the fingerspelled word boy, oyster, olympics, himalaya and yosemite]
[video of the fingerspelled word boy, oyster, olympics, himalaya and yosemite]
Table 3.6: Comparison of slides with the same video in the Explicit and Implicit training programs. For actual representation of slides, refer to AppendicesAandB. The implicit training included (most of) the features Jamieson and Morosan
Acoustic Context: Control group
The implicit training involved delivery of a mixed-media presentation including fin- gerspelling in context.
Identification training: Control group
The implicit training slide presentation, just as the explicit training did, offered feedback. For example, there were several slides in which participants were asked to view fingerspelled words. While their attention was not drawn to whatever feature was demonstrated in the videos (e.g., the -y- with wrist flexion, the -u- and -r- combination, etc.), the same media content was used in this training program. Par- ticipants were told to try to catch as many of the words as possible (these were also slowed to half speed). The next slide showed the words that had been spelled on the previous slide. The video was then repeated so students would have the opportunity to view words they might have missed again.
Acoustic uncertainty: Control group
One important difference between the training of the treatment group and that of the control is that participants’ attention could not be brought to the critically relevant cues in the transitions in fingerspelling. However, this group was still exposed to variability. The training featured videos produced by the experimenter as well as another signer with whom the students had not interacted, though they had seen her in the pre-test.