The role of iconicity in sign language learning by hearing adults.

The feature of transparency has been identified as facilitating the learning of manual signs as word surrogates. The recognition and retention of transparent and nontransparent signs by 50 sign-naive hearing college freshmen was investigated in three tasks: (1) a transparency task; (2) after a training period, a short-term memory task; and (3) a long-term memory task. Results indicated that both transparent and nontransparent signs were retained over a short and a long period of time; however, there was a significant decrease in the number of nontransparent signs retained as the period of time after training increased. Implications for sign language training are discussed.