Over the years the SLLA lab has developed many instruments for use in testing various aspects of linguistic ability in signers, particularly looking at the acquisition of ASL and Libras. Here we share some of the materials we developed for the ASL tests. The tests are grouped according to the appropriate reference to cite if you use one of these tests.
One group of instruments developed for our Bibibi project is described in Quadros et al. (2015). The ASL instruments described in the 2015 publication are available on this page for download and use in future research. Please cite the Quadros et al. (2015) paper for use of ASL instruments described in that paper. For several of these instruments, illustrations were made by the Design Lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC).
Our SLAAASh project spurred us to produce guidelines for calculation of mean length of utterance (MLU) in signing children. We also developed an ASL version of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; originally developed for English by Scarborough 1990). A more extensive description of these instruments and our results from using them is in preparation. Please cite Goodwin et al. (2019) for the use of these instruments (until we publish the more extensive work).
We plan to add other instruments and update citation information so check back from time to time.
Please use Google Chrome as your browser when downloading materials from this page, for best results.
| # | Instrument Name | Description | Available Materials |
| Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Chen Pichler, Deborah, Lillo-Martin, Diane, Cruz, Carina Rebello, Kozak, Laura, Palmer, Jeffrey Levi, Lemos Pizzio, Aline & Reynolds, Wanette (2015). Methods in bimodal bilingualism research: Experimental studies. In Eleni Orfanidou, Bencie Woll & Gary Morgan (Eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Sign Language Studies, 250-280. Blackwell. pdf | |||
| 01 | ASL verbal morphology test 1 & test 2 | Measure of receptive proficiency with verbal morphology in ASL both with and without present referents. | ASL morphology test 1 stimuli |
| 02 | ASL modifier noun order | Measure of production proficiency in correct ordering of modifiers and nouns. | ASL modifier noun word order scoresheet |
| 03 | ASL Wh-questions | Measure of Wh question production proficiency in ASL. | ASL Wh elicitation script |
| 04 | ASL picture naming (production) | Measure of lexical knowledge in ASL. Used as a pre-test to ensure appropriateness of the following phonological tests. | ASL phonological production test stimuli |
| 05 | ASL phonological discrimination (production & perception) | Measures of proficiency in both production and perception of minimal pairs in ASL. | ASL minimal pair scoresheet |
| 06 | ASL phonological awareness | Measure of phonological awareness of handshapes in ASL based on signs elicited in the picture naming test. | ASL handshape awareness scoresheet |
| 07 | ASL non-word/pseudo-sign repetition | Measure of phonological memory and reproduction ability in ASL. Note: Stimuli are presented in a randomized order not indicated on the provided scoresheet. | ASL pseudosign script |
| 08 | Parent-child interaction sample | Images of familiar contexts used to help elicit naturalistic interaction between parents and their children. | Parent child interaction stimuli |
| Goodwin, Corina, Prunier, Lee & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2019). Parental sign input to Deaf children of Deaf parents: Vocabulary and syntax. Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 43. pdf | |||
| 09 | ASL Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) | Measure of syntactic complexity. Requires a sample of 100 analyzable naturalistic utterances. This measure is a work in progress and should not be considered finalized. | ASL MLU coding guide 20190201 |
| 10 | ASL Index of Productive Syntax (ASL-IPSyn) | Measure of syntactic diversity. Requires a sample of 100 analyzable naturalistic utterances.
Revised version 2023-04-26. Comparison scores with 50 utterances to be made available. |
ASL IPSyn revised 171101 |