Categorical Coding of Manual & English Alphabet Characters by Beginning Students of American Sign Language

Beginning students from a class in ASL, who had only recently learned the manual alphabet, were presented a task in which proactive interference (PI) would build up rapidly on successive trials. On the subjects’ last trial the experimental stimuli were switched from Manual Alphabet to English Alphabet, or vice versa. The results support the view of Kolers that different languages have separate memory stores. This conclusion can be generalized even to a very recently acquired second language. A covert translating hypothesis, one that attempts to predict the direction of an asymmetrical release from PI, was not supported by the data.