English 311,"Introduction
to Linguistics"
Language Acquisition of a Deaf Child
by
Sharon D. Wilson
This paper will attempt to bring to light the difficulties the Deaf child
faces when learning English as a second language. For most Deaf children,
American Sign Language (ASL) is considered to be their natural or as we say in
the Deaf Community, native language. Often times Deaf children arrive at school
at age 5 or 6 with no formal language spoken, signed or otherwise-due to the
fact that during the first five years there has been little attempt on the part
of the family to learn to communicate in the child's language of signs. Thus,
they have "lost" valuable learning time frame in which hearing
children have already acquired language. Like the article mentioned
"critical time".
To begin to explain language acquisition, one must first look at the Deaf
child's family background. Those that have Deaf parents, those that have hearing
parents who begin to learn how to sign as soon as they find out their child is
deaf, those who have hearing parents who don't sign and then there are also
those who have parents that don't speak English.
For the child who has Deaf parents and the parents that can sign, that
particular child has the linguistic advantage over the other two. Actually all
four groups of children are the same until about 18 to 22 months (Hoff-Ginsberg
301) when linguistic abilities become apparent. Although there is "a clear
relationship between the children's rate of progress in language learning and
the amount of conversation that they experience with their parents" (Schirmer
19). "A number of researchers have examined the language development of
children who are deaf... and found the stages and sequences of language
development comparable to those found in hearing children" (Schirmer 7).
(See Table 1)
When we look at the first group, the child of deaf parents and hearing
parents who can sign, we will see that the stages of acquisition mirror those of
"normal" hearing children. The second group, the ones that have
parents who don't sign or speak English, at this point are missing out on that
critical period of learning. This eventually leads to delays in communication,
reading and writing.
With the first group, the Deaf child is constantly being exposed to language
because the parents make every effort to share and communicate what's happening
in their immediate environment, just like hearing children. When this child
enters school at age 5, he/she will already have been exposed/introduced to
"reading" books for pleasure. This child will have the rudimentary
knowledge of the alphabet, counting numbers, knowing colors and describing
objects by using classifiers. (Classifiers are specific ASL hand shapes that
describe or represent an object and/or motion of the object). The child will
know personal information: how to spell his name, his siblings' names and their
ages. All this sets the stage for a successful language acquisition and the
eventual acquisition of written English.
With the second group, the potential is there, but not developed as strongly
as the first because there is no common language happening between the parents
and the Deaf child. Often the parents find out "too late" that their
child is Deaf (usually at about age 3) and they try to figure out what to do -
most doctors refer them to speech pathologists who advocate the aural/oral
method which doesn't help if the child is profoundly severely deaf. (Oral
methods focus on speech and lip reading rather than the development of
language). There will be some attempt on the part of the parents to use gestures
or home signs to communicate "superficial" needs such as eat, sleep,
drink, brush-teeth, bath and go (uses finger to point) just to name a few. These
are often only one word commands, not in a complete sentence whereas in the
first group the parents would sign to the child "Are you hungry?",
"What would you like to eat?" and so forth. This child may or may not
know his siblings' names - referring to them as "girl" or
"boy" at home rather than saying my "sister/brother". It is
also likely that "reading" books have not been encouraged in the
second group due to the fact that there is not enough knowledge of formal signs
on the part of the parents to tell the story. What happens here is that the
child will just look at the pictures and flip the pages over without really
processing what is happening on the pages. Now when the child enters school,
he/she may not be able to recite the alphabet or even count as high as the child
from the first group. Thus the stage is set for the classroom teacher who must
start by going back and reintroducing the concepts that were missed during the
critical period of language acquisition.
The difficulty in learning English begins when the child is introduced to the
printed word in conjunction with English syntax at about the 1st grade. Because
ASL is wholly different from English and the child has never heard the spoken
word, there are obvious gaps that need to be addressed as soon as possible. At
this point English becomes a second language that is often confusing and at
times intimidating. Many phrases and idioms are not understood because the deaf
child perceives language visually and conceptually. A good example would be to
look at the English idiom "hit the road". The child would sign
"hit" (as in to physically hit something) "the"
"road" which obviously is not conceptually accurate. The ASL
equivalent would be to sign "TAKE-OFF". "The translation of a
sign is referred to linguistically as its gloss, or equivalent in English"
(Costello xii). In ASL, "be" verbs are never used and the same can be
said of articles (a, an, the).
What also doesn't help is when schools hire teachers of the deaf who are not
fluent in ASL. This also contributes to the linguistic input that the child is
having difficulties with. If the educator cannot educate appropriately in the
child's native language, how then, do we expect the child to learn? Should we
find fault with the teachers because their graduate study programs did not
adequately prepare them for the "real world" or should we find fault
with the programs themselves? That is another issue in and of itself because not
all graduate study programs are created equal.
In a perfect world, all teachers of the Deaf will be fluent in American Sign
Language thereby creating the perfect teaching model. Let's take a look at a
classroom where the teacher is a native signer of ASL. This type of teacher will
foster language growth among the children by modeling language for them. By
modeling, I mean that the teacher will write a sentence in English on the board
and sign it in ASL. The reverse can be done, sign a sentence in ASL then write
the English equivalent on the board. With younger children, the writing takes
place when they start to label things around them. What the teacher often does,
is to have the child "write" about what he has recently drawn a
picture of. When that happens, the child will write a string of words that do
not make sense grammatically but does make sense conceptually and this is where
the teacher steps in with modeling English. What the teacher does is to have the
child sign back to her what he has written and then the teacher shows the
written equivalent of the child's work. For example, let's say the child has
drawn a picture of his trip to the circus over the weekend with his family. He
might write: "Me circus go. Elephant see finish me" and the teacher
will write next to it "I went to the circus. I saw an elephant." Over
a period of time, those children that have come from a "language rich"
home will "pick up" the English syntax a bit quicker than those whose
home environment were not as supportive. For this second group, acquiring
English will always be a difficult task.
Research shows that "American Sign Language is an autonomous linguistic
system, independent from English. It has all of the features that make a
language a unique communication system (Valli and Lucas 15). ASL has its own
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and structure.
In ASL, phonology is the study of how signs are structured and organized. ASL
signs have five parameters which are:
1. hand shape
2. location
3. movement
4. palm orientation and non-manual signs (facial expression)
ASL signs can and do share one or more parameters, but if one parameter
changes, it changes the meaning of the sign. For example, the hand shape for
TRAIN and SHORT
have the same location movement but the palm orientation is different thereby
giving each sign its meaning.
However, we must be aware that these individual parameters by themselves have
no meaning. When we look at the fact that sign has a handshake, location,
orientation and movement, it now has a specific meaning and becomes a morpheme.
Morphemes are the smallest indivisible unit of meaning.
In ASL, there are two types of morphemes: inflectional and derivational.
These include noun-verb pairs, compounds, subject-object agreement, aspect,
finger spelling, foreign loan signs (taking a sign from another language),
numerical incorporation and formation of classifier predicates. Derivational
morphology is the process of making new units for the language. For example: the
sign CHAIR comes from the sign SIT. Inflectional morphology is the process of
adding grammatical information to unit that already exists. For example: SIT has
one movement and TO-SIT-FOR-A-LONG-TIME has an ongoing movement (Valli and Lucas
110).
Syntax is the sentence pattern of language be it English or ASL. ASL's syntax
has four major lexical categories: Nouns, Predicates, Adjectives and Adverbs and
five minor lexical categories: Determiners, Auxiliary Verbs, Prepositions,
Conjunctions and Pronouns. Then sentence structures or types are as follows:
Questions, Negations, Commands, Topicalization and Conditionals.
Semantics is the study of ways in which languages structure meaning. Say
there is a group of people who share the same language (ASL), then it is only
natural that they will understand each other. But if you bring in a person who
uses a completely different language (e.g. Italian Sign Language (LIS)), then
you have a communication problem because the same signs that are found in each
language do not have the same meaning. An example would be the ASL sign for
"NAME" is the sign for "ROME" in LIS.
The significance of this research is to prove that American Sign Language is
a true language and not just pantomime and/or gestures. Those who advocate the
oral/aural method of teaching have long said that ASL has no place in our
schools. The thing about the advocates' thinking is that they forget that the
child is only just learning how to articulate the spoken word rather than
focusing on developing language for communication. When a profoundly deaf child
has been educated orally, it has been shown that he will most certainly be
lagging 1 to 2 years behind those of his peers who have been educated using sign
language. To bring up a point, I must say that the profoundly deaf child who
tries to lip read will miss at least 50% of what is being said on the lips.
Because of this, how can we expect these children to even begin to understand
how the English language works? To top it all off, it has often been said that
ASL has contributed to the failure of the Deaf child's language acquisition and
development. ASL has always been the scapegoat even though the real problem lies
with the fact that we must take a good hard look at who is teaching our
children. Why did the child fail? I say it's not the child but the educational
system and the programs that send out teachers unprepared for the task at hand.
Works Cited
Costello, Elaine. Signing: How to Speak With Your Hands New York:
Bantam,
1983
Hoff-Ginsberg, Erika. Language Development Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole, 1997
Schirmer, Barbara R. Language and Literacy Development in Children Who
are
Deaf New York: MacMillan, 1994
Valli, Clayton and Lucas, Ceil. Linguistics of American Sign Language:
An
Introduction Washington, D. C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1995