Examining Confidence in Perceptions of ASL Russian and Portuguese
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
There are common misconceptions about American Sign Language (ASL) such as it is mostly gesture or that it is easy to learn. These misconceptions can lead to parents delaying the teaching of ASL to their deaf children which could cause developmental delays and permanent problems. This project examined people’s confidence in guessing ASL signs and compared it to confidence in guessing words from an unknown foreign spoken language. An experiment was adapted from a study done by Sehyr and Emmory (2019) which asked participants to guess what ten different ASL signs meant in English. It was changed to also have the participants rate their confidence in their guess. This experiment was further adapted to replace ASL signs with words from Portuguese and Russian. Experiment 1 collected accuracy and confidence ratings from 713 participants across 425 signs. Participants were inaccurate and overconfident in their guesses. Confidence was correlated with accuracy but there was a higher correlation with dominant guess percentage and confidence which indicates that there is a hidden group consensus that leads to confidence. Experiment 2 (Portuguese) and 3 (Russian) collected accuracy and confidence ratings from 98 and 95 participants respectively across 30 words from each language. Both experiments had lower accuracy and confidence on average than ASL. However, both experiments had correlations between confidence and dominant guess which indicates that it is not just accuracy that contributes to confidence. Additionally, in experiment 2 and 3 participants were flatly asked whether they thought ASL was easier to learn than other languages. On average, participants thought ASL was easier to learn than spoken languages. This project indicates that on average people are disproportionately confident in ASL compared to spoken foreign languages, and that misconceptions of ASL still persist.
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Keywords
ASL, Confidence, Transparency