Ratings of Translucency in Manual Signs as a Predictor of Sign Learnability

Abstract
Increased interest has begun to be shown toward manual sign as an augmentative communication mode for language-impaired individuals. Unfortunately, relatively less attention has been given to delineating psycholinguistic variables which might affect sign learning. One attribute shown to facilitate sign learning is the perceived translucency (relatedness) between sign and gloss. The current project was an attempt to obtain translucency ratings for a large sample of manual signs as well as a comparison of the relative translucency of nouns to verbs.
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