Following the Rules

Consistency in Sign

The majority of hearing-impaired students in the United States are exposed to at least one, if not several, forms of simultaneously signed and spoken English input (e.g., Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, Signed/Manual English, or combinations of these systems). It was the purpose of this study to investigate teachers' and interpreters' consistency with regard to following the rules of three of these systems. Subjects were asked to interpret a carefully designed set of stimuli; their performance was videotaped for later bimodal transcription and analysis. Careful descriptive analysis of the form and content of the data revealed that some professionals who purported to use a particular system frequently do not follow accurately the rules of that system, but many can encode in sign the meaning of what they are saying. Signing Exact English (SEE-II) users were able to follow the rules of that system at a significantly higher percentage of time than users of either of the other two systems (p<.03 and p<.001). They also were able to encode the meaning in sign of what they were saying an average of 86% of the time—significantly higher than users of Signed/Manual English (p<.02). However, the average percentage of ability to follow the precise rules of a system was below 57% for even the adults who used SEE-II. It is possible that the acquisition of English is confounded for hearing-impaired children when professionals do not consistently sign the system they purport to use.

KEY WORDS: hearing impairment, language use, teachers, sign systems, research

Submitted on January 24, 1990
Accepted on January 31, 1991

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