| Abstract | Investigated serial recall by 20 congenitally, profoundly deaf signers for visually specified linguistic information presented in their primary language, American Sign Language (ASL), and in printed or fingerspelled English. 20 congenitally deaf adults and 10 hearing undergraduates served as controls. There were 3 main findings. First, differences in the serial-position curves across these conditions distinguished the changing-state stimuli from the static stimuli. These differences were a recency advantage and a primacy disadvantage for the ASL signs and fingerspelled English words, relative to the printed English words. Second, the deaf Ss, who were college students and graduates, used a sign-based code to recall ASL signs but not to recall English words; this suggests that well-educated deaf signers do not translate into their primary language when the information to be recalled is in English. Third, mean recall of the deaf Ss for ordered lists of ASL signs and fingerspelled and printed English words was significantly less than that of hearing control Ss for the printed words; this difference may be explained by the particular efficacy of a speech-based code used by hearing individuals for retention of ordered linguistic information and by the relatively limited speech experience of congenitally, profoundly deaf individuals. |