Lecture 15: Language in the Deaf World

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears. The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.
-- Victor Hugo to Ferdinand Berthier, November 25, 1845

Some History

France was the cradle of Western deaf education. In the 1760s the Abbé de l'Epée established the first public school for the Deaf in history. l'Epée observed two Deaf girls signing and realized that this could be used in their education. He apparently did not realize that OFSL was a fully developed, natural language. Instead, he immediately set about modifying the signed language that his pupils taught him. He devised signs to represent all the verb endings, articles prepositions, and auxiliary verbs which are present in spoken French. Thus, for example, the word "believe" was analyzed as the sum of "know" plus "feel" plus "say" plus "not see" and it was signed by executing the corresponding four signs and that for "verb" (Lane, 1980:122). By the early 19th century, when the Paris school had been taken over by l'Epée's successor, Sicard, former teachers and students from the Paris school had gone on to establish several schools in France.

In 1816 a young protestant minister, Thomas Gaullaudet, was sent to England by a group of parents of Deaf American children to learn the Braidwood method. The Braidwoods had several schools in Britain but refused to divulge their methods and suggested that instead they come and set up an American franchise. This turn of events must have been frustrating for the young Gaullaudet but it was just as well for the history of Deaf education in America because the Braidwoods used a strictly oral method.

While in London Gaullaudet met a group of l'Epée's students, including Sicard and Laurent Clerc. He travelled back to France to see their techniques in action. He was impressed and persuaded the Deaf Clerc to travel back to Hartford with him to establish the first American school for the Deaf. On the boat trip back Clerc taught Gaullaudet French Sign Language and Gaullaudet taught Clerc English. Within a short time they established a school and ASL grew out of the creolization of French Sign Language and the native sign of Americans, many of whom came from the Deaf community on Martha's Vineyard. Today, linguists estimate that there may be as much as 58 percent cognates for a sample of 872 modern ASL and FSL words (Lane, 1987:55). Modern British Sign Language and ASL, on the other hand, are almost mutually incomprehensible.

In 1880 a disaster befell the Deaf community. At the infamous Milan Congress hearing educators of the Deaf from a number of countries voted for the following resolution:

  1. The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of speech over signs, for restoring deaf-mutes to social life [and] giving them greater facility of language, declare that the method of articulation should have preference over that of signs in the instruction and education of the deaf and dumb;
  2. Considering that the simultaneous use of signs and speech has the disadvantage of injuring speech and lip-reading and precision of ideas, the convention declares that the pure oral method ought to be preferred.
No Deaf teachers were present at this "international congress" and they were effectively ousted from Deaf education by means of this resolution.

Oralism

Teaching a Deaf person who cannot receive auditory feedback to speak is an enormous task. Recall the diagram of sound formation from my earlier lecture on "The Sounds of Language". Most sounds are not formed in such a way that they are visibel from the outside. Take the difference between /p/ and /b/ we discussed at length; these sounds differ only in the voice onset time, when the vocal chords start vibrating, something that is not visible at the exterior. Speech therapy tries to develop the kinesthetic sense to compensate for the lack of audition. It's intensive, largely unsuccessful, and has taken up the bulk of the school hours of Deaf children in this century.

An important distinction that bears on the potential success of the enterprise is the age at which Deafness occurred. If Deafness is incurred postlingually speech therapy and lipreading have a much higher chance of success. At the time of the Milan Congress, the Victorian era, a higher proportion of the students would have been postlingually deaf as a result of childhood diseases like scarlet fever and rubella. In the modern era, most children who are Deaf were born Deaf or became Deaf shortly after birth.

A system called "cued speech" where the speaker adds signs to indicate the invisible sound distinctions has been invented. This has not been widely used or very successful.

Thought and Language

One of the prevailing myths about sign language, at least from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s was that it was not a complete language. Klima and Bellugi, key investigators of the structure of ASL, put it thus:
At the beginning of our research we did not even know whether ASL was an independent language in the sense which linguists understand that concept... Nowhere was there any indication that this communication system might turn out to be a separate full-blown language.

On the contrary, we had read that sign language is "a collection of vague and loosely defined pictorial gestures"; that it is pantomime; that it is "much too much a depicting language, keeping the thinking slow"; that it is "much too concrete, too broken in pieces"; that "sign language deals mainly with material objects, dreads and avoids the abstract"; that "sign language has disadvantages, especially those of grammatical disorder, illogical systems, and linguistic confusion"; that "sign language has no grammar"; that it is a "universal" communication; that it is "derived from English, a pidgin form of English with no structure of its own."

The prejudice and ignorance evident in these statements is staggering. Much Whorfian thinking is revealed in them. Klima, Bellugi and a large team of deaf and hearing investigators set about systematically dismantling these misconceptions.

Sign and Gesture

The distinction between sign language and gesture is quite clear. To sign is to consciously use the hands linguistically to express the same range of meaning as would be achieved by speech. Klima, Bellugi et al demonstrated that pamtomime and ASL are easily distinguished. They asked ten nonsigners to convey in gestures the meanings of individual English words. In the following image the word was 'egg':
The pantomimes were significantly longer and much more variable than the ASL signs for the same word. Pantomimes were made in continuous motion, whereas with the ASL sign the hands were moved into the correct handshape for the sign, then were held briefly in this position before making the movement inherent to the sign itself.

Although the distinction between the form of pantomime and sign is clear enough, many regular ASL signs clearly exhibit traces of mimetic properties. What do the following signs depict?

Although the different sign languages vary in their choice of sign for "tree", they all possess some iconicity. This ties into the statements about the universality and concreteness of sign language. Klima and Bellugi asked, 'Can a nonsigner presented with an ASL sign (and no other information) correctly ascertain its meaning?' Ninety signs for common abstract and concrete nouns weere made by a native signer and presented on videotape to a group of ten hearing subjects who had no prior knowledge of sign language. Not a single subject was able to guess the meaning of 81 of the 90 signs. The few signs that were transparent to even one of the hearing subjects were BED, BUTTON, EAR, EYES, MARBLE, MILK, OPERATION, PIE and SURPRISE. But for each of these signs many responses were not acceptable translations. Klima and Bellugi then made their test easier by constructing a multiple choice test. A new group of ten hearing nonsigning subjects performed this test and did no better than chance (18.2%, chance would be 20% given 5 alterantives) at choosing the correct meaning for a sign.

The submergence of iconicity

In addition to their iconic representational qualities, signs exhibit another level of organization. Sign posseses the feature of duality of patterning I discussed in an earlier lecture. English is a spoken language that consists of phonemes, units of sound that are meaningless in and of themselves, but which can be combined to form an enormous number of meaningfull words. The basic contrastive units of sign language are referred to as cheremes. Stokoe identified three classes of cheremes:
  1. tab (tabula) the location of the sign space where a sign is made
  2. dez (designator) the active hand configuration used to make the sign
  3. sig (signation) the motion of the active hand
Signs are described as simultaneously occurring combinations of tab, dez, and sig. There is a strong tendency towards hand symmetry: if a sign requires two active hands, the hands will have identical shapes and orientations.

A comparison between sign forms in two independent sign languages, such as Chinese and American, suggests that there are abstract formational constraints on the lexical items of the language. Some handshapes, locations and movements are language-specific and may function differently in combination in different languages. ASL appears to be processed, coded, and produced by native signers, not in terms of overall representational qualities, but rather as constituted of a limited set of elements in a combinatorial system.

This coexistence of the iconic and the arbitrary in signs may seem paradoxical. Studies of historical change in signs can be helpful in realizing the nature of their interaction. Take the sign for 'home'. This sign is opaque to nonsigners but when its roots are revealed the iconicity becomes evident.

The original iconicity is subsumed by the abstract nature of the resulting conventional sign. This submergence of iconicity is also evident in the way roots are modified in meaning. For example, the sign for slow is indeed slow, but the sign for 'very slow' is formed by the conventional means of stressing a word - more rapid movement - thus the sign for 'very slow' is faster than the sign for 'slow' because a general rule rather than a specific iconicity or pantomime is operating.

Total Communication

In the 1960s and 1970s many studies were done on the structure of sign language that broke down the myths about its pantomimic, concrete, iconic, agrammatical nature. Further, many educational studies were conducted that produced the clear conclusion that the academic achievement of Deaf children of Deaf parents far surpassed that of Deaf children of hearing parents, including in reading and writing in English. As a result of these studies and the Deaf activism they fueled, the educational system for the Deaf was transformed from one that used primarily spoken English to one that used Total Communication.

Total Communication was intended to be a system that encouraged teachers to use all means of communication at their disposal, including ASL, English, pantomime, drawing, and fingerspelling. In practice it has become simply what is known as sim-com. Simultaneous Communication (sim-com) is a communication strategy in which speech and signs are used at the same time. It is not possible to speak and sign two languages as different as English and ASL simultaneously, so a form of Signed English is usually used. This results in a dropping of the ability of ASL to compensate for the relative slowness of signing compared to speech by simultaneously signalling a number of things. Signed English is slow especially if it involves finger-spelling. Thus many of the signs are dropped or simplified in sim-com.

Manually Coded English (MCE) borrows signs from ASL, but adds other signs to capture English grammar. Some of the function words are fingerspelled, and in the "Signing Exact English" variant -L-Y is fingerspelled at the end of adjectives to create adverbs. The important thing to note is that MCE is no-one's native language. It is labororious and slow for native speakers of both English and ASL.

Sources:

  1. Sacks, O. (1989) Seeing Voices, University of California Press: Berkeley.
  2. Klima, E. & Bellugi, U. (1979) The Signs of Language, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
  3. Lane, H., Hoffmeister, R., & Bahan, B. (1996) A Journey into the DEAF-WORLD, DawnSignPress: San Diego, CA.
  4. Rymer, R. (1988) Signs of Fluency, The Sciences, September/October, 5-7.
  5. Neisser, A. (1983) The Other Side of Silence, Gaullaudet University Press: Washington, DC.
  6. Crystal, D. (1997) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
  7. A Short History of ASL