Introduction

Linguistic categories (e.g. segment, syllable, etc.) have long enabled cogent descriptions of the systematic patterns apparent in spoken languages. Beginning with the seminal work of William Stokoe (1960; 1965), research on the structure of American Sign Language (ASL) has demonstrated that linguistic categories are useful in capturing extant patterns found in a signed language. For example, recognition of a syllable unit permits accounts of morphophonological processes and places constraints on sign forms (Brentari 1990; Perlmutter 1993; Sandler 1993; Corina 1996). Acknowledgment of Movement and Location segments permits descriptions of infixation processes (Liddell and Johnson 1985; Sandler 1986). Feature hierarchies provide accounts of assimilations that are observed in the language and also help to explain those that do not occur (Corina and Sandler 1993). These investigations of linguistic structure have led to a better understanding of both the similarities and differences between signed and spoken language.

Psycholinguists have long sought to understand whether the linguistic categories that are useful for describing patterns in languages are evident in the perception and production of a language. To the extent that behavioral reflexes of these theoretical constructs can be quantified, they are deemed as having a ‘psychological reality’. Psycholinguistic research has been successful in establishing empirical relationships between a subject's behavior and linguistic categories using reaction time and electrophysiological measures.

This chapter describes efforts to use psycholinguistic paradigms to explore the psychological reality of form-based representations in ASL.