measuring reaction times in sign language naming experiments

[David Corina]

We have done lots of work in this area in my lab and associated labs.
We have tried two different senarios.

The "Lift-off" method as you describe was successfully used in a study
of Spanish Signing where RT for Lexical Decisions were gathered.
A ms. using this method is now under review.

A second method uses a inexpensive "infared" trip beam.
These are available from companies like Radio Shack and are typically used
for tripping bell or buzzer for an entry way (breaking the reflected
beam causes the circuit to send a .5v TTL sign high or low depending
on how you configure this.)

We built a bracket for this devise, so that the subject rests thier hands
on the bracket and when they "lift off" to sign, it trips the beam.
PsycScope button box and software was used to record RT's.  This
has been successfully used in several experiments of ASL sign naming, some
of which are referred to in The Psychological Reality of Phonological
Structure in American Sign Languae (in press), in R, Meier, D. Quinto &
K. Cormeir (eds) Modality and structure in signed and spoken languages.
Cambridge Univ. Press.

Both appear to work, however a systematic test, of say sign frequency
effects in sign has not been evaluated using these two methods which might
provide an indication of whether one method or the other is better.


Hope this helps.

David Corina Ph.D.
Cognitive Neuropsychology Lab
Dept of Psychology
University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195



On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, James T. Myers wrote:

> I haven't been on this list long enough to know
> whether or not this question has already been
> addressed, so forgive the repetition if it has.
>
> I'm planning to conduct psycholinguistic experiments
> on Taiwan Sign Language involving a naming task
> -- e.g. the participants see either a picture or
> a Chinese word on a computer screen, and they
> have to produce the appropriate TSL sign.  I want
> to measure the response time, i.e. the duration between
> the onset of the visual display and the onset of signing,
> e.g. lifting the hands up from some resting position.
>
> Has anybody done anything like this before?  I want
> to be able to cite some previous work like this,
> and I also want to get ideas on the best way to
> do it technically.  The best idea I've come across
> so far was attributed to Ursula Bellugi (who apparently
> has not published any study using it):  have the
> signers begin with their hands resting on a button
> (on a specially-made button box, or just on regular
> keyboard keys), and then when they begin to sign
> the time at which they lift the hands can be measured.
> One disadvantage is that it assumes that signers
> will always lift the same hand first, or both hands
> at the same time.
>
> Comments of all sorts most welcome, and I'll post
> a summary.
>
> James Myers
> Graduate Institute of Linguistics
> National Chung Cheng University
> Min-Hsiung, Chia-Yi  621
> TAIWAN, ROC
> Email:  lngmyers at ccunix.ccu.edu.tw
> Web:    http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/
> Phone:  886-5-242-8251
> Fax:    886-5-272-1654
>