Subjective frequency ratings for 432 ASL signs

Given the importance of lexical frequency for psycholinguistic research, and the lack of comprehensive frequency data for sign languages, we collected subjective estimates of lexical frequency for 432 signs in American Sign Language. Participants were 59 deaf signers who first began to acquire ASL at ages ranging from birth to 14 years with a minimum of 10 years experience. Subjective frequency estimates were made on a scale ranging from 1 = rarely see the sign to 7 = always see the sign. Mean subjective frequency ratings for individual signs did not vary in relation to age of sign language exposure (AoLE), chronological age, or length of ASL experience. Nor did AoLE show significant effects on response time for making the ratings. However, RT was highly correlated with mean frequency rating. These results suggest that the distributions of subjective lexical frequencies are consistent across signers with varying AoLE. The implications for research practice are that subjective frequency ratings from random samples of highly experienced deaf signers can provide a reasonable measures of lexical control in sign language experiments. The appendix gives the mean and median subjective frequency rating, and the median and mean log(RT) for the ASL signs for the entire sample; the supplemental material gives these measures for three AoLE groups, Native, Early, and Late

Towards a Constructional Approach of L2 Morphological Processing

International audienceFollowing Silva & Clahsen seminal work, psycholinguistic research on L2 morphological processing has mainly adopted a morpheme-based, decompo-sitional dual route approach suggesting that L2 learners have a limited access to morphological representation during processing and consequently rely more on lexical storage (Clahsen H, Felser C, Neubauer K, Sato M, Silva R, Lang Learn 60:21-43, 2010; Clahsen and Felser, 2017). Therefore, experimental research, which largely used the masked priming paradigm, mainly focused on the distinction between storage and computation as two alternative, mutually exclusive and competing mechanisms. In this paper, we claim that a word-based approach, which considers morphology in terms of constructional schemas, allows us to overcome the rule vs. list fallacy and therefore reshapes the dichotomy between L1 and L2 processing mechanisms. Although a consistent proposal is still out of reach, given that data on L2 processing are limited, we will discuss the advantages of a model which jointly considers formal and semantic similarities, as well as paradigmatic proprieties