The difficulties of learning fingerspelling: an experimental investigation with hearing adult learners.

Fingerspelling is used to support sign languages, providing a means by which words without signs may be communicated. As with signing itself, it has often been reported that learners find greater difficulty reading fingerspelling than they do in encoding it. An experiment tested the skills of adult hearing learners of the two-handed fingerspelling system used in British Sign Language. Participants were asked to read video recordings of their own fingerspellings; thus each undertook the reading task at their own spelling speed. Participants were divided into fast and slow spellers. Each group made more errors in the reading than the spelling task and this continued to be the case when read items received a contextual cue to assist recognition. Words with regular and irregular spellings were used as a means to investigate the cognitive processes underlying fingerspelling. Regular words were spelled faster and read more accurately, suggesting that these processes place some reliance on phonological encoding. The implications of these results of the learning and practice of fingerspelling are discussed.