The Role of Language Dominance in English Influence on American Sign Language

Abstract

This study examined the impact of language dominance on variation in American Sign Language (ASL) production among 100 proficient deaf and hard of hearing signers who acquired ASL before age eight. While ASL variation has traditionally been attributed to factors like age of acquisition, proficiency, and sociolinguistic influences, this study introduced language dominance, a known factor modulating the presence of linguistic elements from one language within another among bilingual speakers. Findings revealed that ASL-English language dominance moderately predicted the use of English mouthings (operationalized here as mouthings) and ASL classifiers (operationalized as classifiers): ASL-dominant signers produced fewer mouthings and more classifiers, while English-dominant signers displayed the opposite pattern. Notably, this influence was consistent in both native and early nonnative signers, suggesting that the integration of English elements is not solely due to proficiency limitations but also reflects bilingual language dynamics. These results indicate that sign-spoken bilinguals may often operate in a bilingual mode, accessing both ASL and English syntactic structures during ASL discourse. Implications extend to ASL documentation and proficiency tests, as traditional monolingual frameworks may not capture the fluid syntactic variation in signing ecologies. This finding also suggests that aspects of English grammar may be amodal for ASL signers, with potential applications for bilingual processing models.