The Effects of Learning American Sign Language on College Students? Spatial Cognition

Previous research has shown that knowing a signed language enhances visuospatial cognition in numerous ways. The present study examined how much experience with and/or fluency in American Sign Language is needed to enhance hearing college students’ spatial cognitive skills. In Study 1, beginning students of ASL (n = 20) and of new spoken languages (n = 6) were tested on a battery of spatial cognition tasks before and after one semester of language instruction. Few significant differences were found between or within these groups from pretest to posttest, indicating that more ASL fluency is needed for spatial benefit to appear. In Study 2, there were no significant differences on task performance between control participants (n = 8), beginning ASL participants (n = 20), and intermediate ASL participants (n = 16). However, correlations between spatial task performance and both self-report measures and ASL instructor-rated measures were pervasive, suggesting underlying relationships between ASL confidence/improvement/fluency and performance on various visual-spatial tasks. The results suggest that, while neither one nor three semesters is sufficient for significant differences in spatial cognition to be observed on a group level, individual-level correlations between increased proficiency in sign language and heightened spatial cognition are already apparent. After such a short period of time, it seems that time learning ASL is, on a broad scale, too coarse a measure of assessment, but individual attainment is more illuminating in terms of spatial cognitive enhancement early in the learning process. The Effects of ASL on Spatial Cognition 5