How do L2 learners of LIS process code-blending?

Semantic categorization tasks indicate a processing advantage of lexical bimodal-bilingual stimuli (simultaneous production of a sign and a spoken language) over unimodal stimuli (only signed or only spoken language) in the population of adult native signers (Children of Deaf Adult, CODAs). This finding has been reported for American Sign Language-English (Emmorey et al. 2012), Italian Sign Language (LIS)-Italian, and French Sign Language-French (Giustolisi et al. 2024). Such an advantage is not found when stimuli are sentences (Giustolisi et al. 2024). In this work, we report two experiments in LIS-Italian to explore whether these findings reported for the CODA population are also found in second language learners of LIS. Experimental results show that L2 learners do not have the same advantage as CODAs at the lexical level, but that frequent L2 users of LIS have a similar behavior in the processing of bimodal-bilingual sentences as CODAs.