Signed Languages and English
The most daunting decision parents must make for a deaf child is the mode of communication to be used at home and in school. For a hearing child, the first years of life are saturated with language-learning experiences. Even in the womb a hearing child is learning to distinguish his mother’s voice from others, and infancy continues this communicative bond with the foundation of being able to distinguish one sound from another in the blur of voices perceived during the first year. Toddlers and preschoolers are in constant need of verbal play and exchange as the language-learning centers in the brain develop and as understanding of the structure of language emerges. In homes where there is a Deaf parent and a Deaf child, the fluent use of sign from the beginning in everyday activities can take the place of oral language, but 95% of deaf children have hearing parents for whom sign as a native language is not an option.
Renowned linguist Noam Chomsky believes there are centers in the brain that are genetically predisposed to be imprinted with linguistic content. According to Chomsky,children are born with knowledge of the principles of grammatical structure inherent in all languages, and this inborn knowledge explains the success and speed with which young children learn language. The period of time for maximum language realization and native fluency is, however, limited to the first few years of life. Research supports the widespread belief that once children reach the age of five, their prime language-learning years are over and it is much more difficult to gain true language competence after that. Memory skills such as the ability to repeat long sentences word for word, or recalling digits in a sequence, are diminished, and understanding of grammatical markers loses accuracy -- at least, for deaf children who are late learners of sign language. There is really no research documenting the differences in late learners of oral language (Mayberry 1258). Even for a late learner of sign, however, chances of developing enough bilingual English-language skill to read at functional levels, and even reasoning ability at higher levels, can be severely diminished. Social and emotional development also depend on free development of language in these years. The effects of a parent’s choice of communicative mode are therefore crucial to the deaf child’s quality of life and lifelong well-being.
Tragically, many parents are unaware of the implications of choices they must make. The most common approaches today are American Sign Language (ASL, the language of the American Deaf community); the oral or oral-aural approaches, using residual hearing with or without an emphasis on lip-reading; and Total Communication, really a variety of different methods of using speech simultaneously with sign to approximate visually the English syntactical structure. In the summer of 2000, I found myself faced with choosing one of these methods for a child we thought was already almost five, who had possibly missed the crucial language learning period of her young life. All the evidence we had suggested that Lena was remarkably well-adjusted for an orphan, much less a hearing-impaired one, and that she was a very intelligent child. As parents, our values and culture, and everything we use to make meaning of our lives and hoped to impart to our children, was based on access to the written word. Our number one priority for our children, hearing or deaf, was that they be able to read as well as they possibly could. More than intelligible speech, this was our great desire for Lena.
When I first began to investigate
education options for the deaf, my first assumption was that the way one
communicates with a deaf person is to use sign language. With Gallaudet
University only a few miles from my home, I was aware of a thriving
Deaf community with opportunities for higher education and a full
social life. I investigated the Maryland School for the Deaf, a residential
and day-school that teaches ASL as the first language for deaf children,
with English taught as a second language through exposure to the written
form. I soon learned that signed languages do not have the same word order
or structure as spoken language, upon which written language is based.
Moreover, to a profoundly deaf signer without access to phonetic information
about spoken language, the written word is just a set of shapes to be
memorized with no meaning associated from natural, everyday usage. English
is truly a second language for most deaf signers, one that is more difficult
to learn than Japanese for native English speakers.
A typical deaf child is taught
several hundred English sight words through association with pictures,
objects, or actions. These can be paired with signs in teaching them,
but the child cannot “sound out” a word that is unfamiliar to her.
She must either constantly have help, or be furnished with material
that has only words already in her sight vocabulary.
She is far from being an independent reader.A very small percentage
of children, with enough parental or teacher support, can learn to read
material well enough to pick up the meaning of unfamiliar words by the
context or accompanying pictures. Function words, however, cause most
deaf children difficulty. A hearing child picks up words like “the,” “an,”
“of,” and “for” without effort over the first three to five years of life.
But for the profoundly deaf child who grew up as a native signer, these
words are first encountered in the written form. “The” or “of” is just
a word to say, a word with no meaning that appears over and over. These
function words can convince deaf children that reading is too difficult
to master. In order to read above a fourth-grade level, the child needs
to know 20 to 40 different uses for each common preposition. In the Cued
Speech Resource Book, a reference I came to rely on, Dr. Orrin Cornett
suggests that such a child might read a sentence something like this:“____
years ago, ___ man _____ __ flashlight _____ prowling _____ ___ ______
coral caves _____ Bonaire, ___ _______ island in ____ southern Caribbean”
(248). Perhaps more important for the deaf child than the difficulty of
learning sounds associated with letters (phonics), is the difficulty of
patterns of words grouped together. English word order and syntax are
often impossible for the new deaf reader to access, while her hearing
peers have heard these patterns millions of times before, from infancy
onward.
ASL is a complete, complex
language of great beauty, and it is indeed the carrier of
Deaf culture in the United States. It is my hope that Lena will learn
as much ASL as she desires, and make friends with others who are deaf.
However, there is no correspondence between ASL and written English; they
have different vocabularies, very different word order, and are based
on completely different modes of presentation – space and sound. There
is great value in having friends with similar experiences and points of
view. If I had been a Deaf mother, perhaps I could have raised Lena with
ASL in the home, giving her a fluent and natural language model at a level
high enough to bring her English as a second, written language. However,
to become that fluent in ASL would have taken me years of constant, daily
immersion in the Deaf community, just as it would with any other foreign
language. As a hearing mother with no previous involvement in the Deaf
community, I could only be a competent language model in English, my native
tongue. English, then, also had to be Lena’s mother tongue.
The second option available
in our area was Total Communication. This is a mode that pairs ASL
signs with spoken language in English word order. Sometimes signed
"endings" are used to show grammatical changes such as verb
tense or noun number.
I soon became exasperated with the prospects of my future child ever achieving college-level reading and writing, since she was beginning so late in her development and would for a few years have a new, non-native, even incompetent signer as her mother and primary language model. Still, it seemed to me that excellent reading and writing skills are something especially desirable for a deaf child in this media- and text-driven world. I did not give up.
The eight handshapes of Cued Speech (repeated twice)
My next area of exploration was Cued Speech, a method developed in 1966 by Dr. R. Orin Cornett, Ph.D., at Gallaudet University (please see links on the Works Consulted page for more information). Cued Speech is a visual communication system using only eight hand shapes (“cues”) to make the mouth movements of speech look different for every sound. A simple hand-cue beside the mouth, for instance, could tell Lena whether I was saying /mama/, /baba/, /papa/, or even a nonsense word like /maba/ -- all of which look exactly alike on the lips. Using one hand, the hand shapes of Cued Speech identify consonant sounds, while one of four locations of the hand near the mouth identifies the vowel. A hand shape and a location together cue a syllable. Advocates of Cued Speech told me that children raised with this mode of English typically have receptive English language skills equal to their hearing peers, even to the point of scoring the same as hearing students on the SAT. They read at the same levels as hearing peers, using the same reading strategies. The only other method currently in use to visually represent phonemes in English is a system called "visual phonemes," which assigns a separate sign to each phoneme in English, some of which are a visual and tactile reminder of the way a sound is produced in the mouth. Visual phonemes have proven useful in teaching signers to "sound out" words from print, but it is too cumbersome to use in everyday communication.
I
found that there had been many of cases of children raised in the oral
method, who at age six or seven with huge language delays, made up the
deficit in three or four years using Cued Speech in everyday communication,
and as a result became good readers. It would not take years to master,
only a weekend workshop for the whole method. Although it would take several
months to become fluent enough to cue at a normal speaking rate, Lena
would need the slower pace at first anyway. Even if we decided to add
sign later, Cued Speech was compatible with other methods incorporating
the spoken word in any way. Finally, using Cued Speech would teach English
to Lena in such a way that it could become her native language, and the
intuitive ease of understanding English vocabulary and word-order would
likely enable her to become an excellent lip-reader. The choice was made,
and we have not regretted it.
On to: Deaf/deaf