A sign is a mapping between a phonological form and a meaning. In this
study, four tasks were devised to measure different aspects of this mapping in
BSL: meaning recognition, form recognition, form recall, and meaning recall.
In addition, the meaning recall task tapped into the associative links between
signs. The main aim was to investigate whether there is a hierarchy of difficulty
for these tasks and, therefore, whether BSL vocabulary acquisition proceeds
incrementally, as is the case for spoken languages