The deaf and language: sign, oral, written

By now most of us have had the opportunity to experience sign language. You may wonder whether
those signs truly are part of a language or are just a collection of gestures.And how can we judge
whether persons who use ‘sign language’ truly have language?
First, a sign language is a true language because the language system allows a signer to comprehend and
produce an indefinitely large number of grammatical sentences in signs. Secondly, a signing person has a
true language if that person can communicate by sign. Secondly, a signing person has a true language if
that person can communicate by sign. This is reasonable because we can all agree that people who
communicate in speech do have language.
There is, of course, a difference in the physical means of communication: signing involves light and
speech involves sound. But a particular physical mode is not an essential aspect of language. Of course,
language must depend on some physical mode for its use and learning but that mode need not be limited
to sound. The mode can be visual, as in signing, or even touch as in languages used by the deaf-blind.
Research on sign languages seriously began for the most part in the 1960s when linguists and
psycholinguists addressed themselves to this newly discovered area. The findings showed that signers of
such sign languages as American Sign Language, French Sign Language, British Sign Language, and
others, can indeed communicate in sign whatever is expressed in speech.
Other sign languages may be incomplete syntactically or limited in terms of vocabulary. Such
incomplete sign languages are typically found in developing countries. In Japan, for example, where the
national government until recently prohibited the teaching and use of sign language in public schools,
standardization and vocabulary are problems.
Not only can a fluent signer of a complete sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) sign
whatever a speaker can say, but the signer communicates at about the same speed as a speaker does. The
speed at which signers produce sentences (more precisely the ideas that underlie sentences) in a signed
conversation tends to be similar to that at which speakers produce sentences in a spoken conversation
This occurs even though a signer, as does a speaker, has the ability to exceed this speed.
There may even be strong dialectic differences within a language from region to region within a
country. For example, signers from Paris have difficulty in understanding signers from Lyon. American
Sign Language and British Sign Language (BSL) are not mutually intelligible. American Sign Language
actually has more in common with French Sign Language than with British Sign Language because ASL
was derived from French Sign Language early in the nineteenth century. British Sign Language had its
beginnings before the seventeenth century, with the first deaf schools opening in Britain in the late
eighteenth century.
On the contrary to common belief, there is no universal sign language. There are some similarities
among languages, but not many. Like speech-based languages, a sign language is part of a culture. It may
be useful to learn a foreign (or second) language but to give up one’s native language, be that speech or
sign, is something that people are not eager to do.
It will be useful to examine a related means of communication that is used by hearing persons: gestures.
For, although gestures may be complex, they are only collections of signs that are limited in scope and
do not form a true language. Nevertheless, gestures do play an important part in the communication of
hearing persons and they occur both with and without speech.
We use gestures to communicate a variety of types of messages, as, for example, in indicating: greetings:
hello, goodbye – by moving the hands and arms; requests/commands: come, go, stop – by moving the
hands; answers: yes, no, I don’t know – by moving the head; descriptions: tall, short, long – by use of
the hands and arms.
Gestures are often similar but seldom universal. Most gestures are specific to cultural, linguistic, or
geographic areas. To indicate ‘self’ (I/me), most Westerners point to their chest with their index finger.
Chinese and Japanese, however, point to their nose with that finger.
Facial movements are used everywhere to convey emotions and feelings. Some of these gestures are
natural and universal. We do not actually need to utter a sentence like ‘I am . . . (happy, surprised,
disgusted, disappointed, excited, angry, etc.)’ when we have gestures.
Sign languages use hand, face, or other body movements in a threedimensional space as the physical
means of communication. Principally, there are two types of sign language: one that relates to ordinary
speech-based language and one that is independent of ordinary language.
Sign language based on the speech of ordinary language can be of two different kinds: one that
represents the morphemes of speech and one that represents spelling.
Fingerspelling: letterbyletter
According to this system words are represented by spelling them out letter by letter in terms of
individual signs, where each sign represents a letter of the alphabet. Hand and finger configurations are
used to indicate letters, such as making a V with the index and middle fingers or an O with the thumb
and index finger.
There are both one-hand and two-handed systems of finger spelling .The Americans and Swedes, for
example, use one hand, while the British use two. Users of both systems can sign relatively quickly but
both processes are rather laborious.
The signs of an Independent Sign Language (ISL) can be analyzed into three basic components: (1) hand
configuration: the shape that the hand forms; (2) place of articulation: where in space the hand is
formed; and (3) movement: how the hand moves.
The Oral Approach and Total
Communication

The general public aside, who is it that the ASL people have been strug gling with for
recognition over the years? These have been the proponents of the teaching of speech, the
view called the Oral Approach. The Oral Approach has a worthy aim, to teach the hearing-
impaired to produce and comprehend speech so that they can communicate with the
hearing community.

Oral Approach successful with the less hearing-impaired

The Oral Approach focuses on the teaching of speech production. Its second ary focus is on
speech comprehension. Be that as it may, in this approach children from the age of 2 or 3
years onwards are specially trained in the skill of articulating speech sounds. Also, it is not
uncommon nowadays to have some computerized equipment that displays sounds and assists
in the teaching. Many children do respond and do acquire a fair ability to speak. For the
most part, however, the successes are with children who have only a moderate hearing loss.
Those with more severe impairment typically fare poorly.

Oral Approach fails with the severely hearing-impaired

As was just noted, a great problem with the Oral Approach is that it tends only to work for a
portion of the hearing-impaired population. Research shows, unsurprisingly, that the less
people can hear, the less they will be able to produce and comprehend speech. Thus,
relatively few children who are born with a severe or profound hearing loss (over 75 or 80
decibels in their better ear) acquire any significant degree of speech. Even those with a lesser
hearing loss often do not acquire sufficiently clear pronunciation to be understood by
ordinary hearing persons.

There is a good reason that persons who are severely hearing-impaired do poorly in
producing speech. Simply put, in order to produce speech sounds, one first must hear the
sounds that someone else is making. One must have a target. Without having heard the
target sounds, one would have no basis for comparative judgement.
 Speech teachers of the deaf are trained to assist the deaf person in articu lating speech
sounds. The task is exceedingly difficult for the deaf and severely-impaired, as one might
expect, and most deaf speakers produce speech that is largely unintelligible to ordinary
hearing persons who haven’t had any familiarity with such speech. Most deaf persons are
not mute because of any physical defect with the articulatory system, but mute because they
do not know how to utter appropriate speech sounds.

Speechreading (lipreading) is not easy

The comprehension of speech is usually fostered through both exploiting any residual
hearing that learners may have and the teaching of speechread ing, commonly known as
‘lipreading’. With speechreading, an adept person can interpret about half of what is said,
which, given the great amount of redundancy in ordinary speech, is enough to guess most of
the content. The better the deaf person is in hearing, the better that person will be in both
speaking and speechreading.

A sensible approach: Total Communication

Because of the large number of failing cases as a result of the application of the Oral
Approach, many hearing-impaired persons were not only unable to communicate with the
hearing community but were unable to communicate adequately with their hearing-
impaired friends and colleagues. It was this tragic situation in many places that convinced
educators of the deaf to include sign language in their curriculum along with speech
training. These programmes, which generally go by the name of Total Communication,
spread in the 1970s in the United States, Canada, and other countries. While Total
Communication is now widely accepted in many countries, there is still resistance in many
to admitting sign language into the educational curric ulum for the hearing-impaired.

We believe, too, that in addition to Total Communication an additional type of language,

Written Language, must be taught. This is the written form of the speech-based language
that is prevalent in the deaf person’s country, e.g. Britain, France. Such a language should be
considered as distinct from reading because reading involves persons who already know
their language. The written language approach will be discussed later in the chapter.
The sign language vs. Oral Approach controversy

It was in the 1880s that the Oral Approach advocates defeated Sign Lan guage advocates.
Subsequently, in the United States and other countries, it was the Oral Approach that
dominated deaf education in the schools. Such domination, which included a ban on sign
language, lasted for nearly one hundred years. ASL was proscribed for communication even
among deaf persons. (See Lou, 1988, for a good history of methods in the United States.)

Rationale of Oral advocates in excluding sign language

While Oral Approach advocates, such as Daniel Ling and the Ewings (Ewing and Ewing,
1964), may reluctantly admit that sign language is a language, they argue not only that the
learning and use of sign language negatively affects the acquisition of speech but that
without speech production there will be defective thinking. The teaching of reading and
written language are attacked for similar reasons, which is why the teaching of reading in so
many deaf schools was – and often still is – delayed until children are beyond the second or
third grade. These contentions, which have no basis in empirical observation or
psycholinguistic theory, are false. If anything, knowledge of ASL and reading facilitates the
acquisition of speech (Meadow, 1966; Steinberg et al., 1982). And, as far as thought is
concerned, deaf people without speech are found to test nearly as highly in intelligence as
hearing people despite their typically lower level of formal education (Furth, 1971). It is
unfortunate that such erroneous and detrimental ideas continue to be held in so many
places.

One formidable advocate of the Oral Approach: Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell comes to America

One of the foremost advocates of the Oral Approach was Alexander Graham Bell. It was at
the ill-fated (for Independent Sign Languages) Second Inter national Congress on Education
of the Deaf in Milan in 1880 and at the 1886 American Convention of Instructors of the Deaf
that Bell emphatically presented the view that only speech should be taught to the deaf
regardless of their degree of hearing loss (Bell, 1883). Reading and written language were not
included in the ban.
 Bell himself had been a teacher of deaf children in London, and within a year of his arrival
in North America in 1870 he was teaching, at the age of

23, deaf children in Boston. Bell was intimately involved with deaf people and their
education all of his life. His mother was deaf, his hearing father was a well-known educator
of the deaf who had invented a written phonetic alphabet, Visible Speech, his wife was deaf,
and last, but not least, he was world famous as the inventor of the telephone, which he
invented in Boston in 1875, just five years after landing in America. Bell and his faction were
successful: sign language was banned from most schools for the deaf and it was to take nearly
a hundred years for such a restriction on the use of sign language to be overcome.

Bell versus Edward Gallaudet

Bell’s anti-sign position was pitted against the leader of the pro-sign group in America. This
person was the head of the Gallaudet American Asylum and was none other than the son of
Thomas Gallaudet, one of the founders of ASL, Edward M. Gallaudet. The backgrounds of
Bell and Edward Gallaudet were startlingly similar: both had deaf mothers and hearing
fathers who were devoted to deaf education, and both men themselves were devoted to that
same cause. Gallaudet scoffed at Bell’s advocacy of speechreading. Yet each admired the
other and they had even discussed Bell’s joining the faculty of the recently established
Gallaudet College in Washington, DC. It was Gallaudet College in 1880 that awarded Bell
the first of his many honorary degrees. The feud that the men carried on was a friendly one.

Interestingly, Edward Gallaudet later became sympathetic to the oral method to the
degree that he advocated a ‘Combined Method’, the forerunner of the Total Communication
approach, in which both sign and speech are taught. He no longer scoffed at speechreading
as he had when he first met Bell.
 Public recognition of ASL and growth of deaf pride

As recently as the 1970s some deaf educators (mainly those who opposed the use of sign
language) denied that a sign language could be a genuine language. Such scholarly denial
reflected the opinion of many hearing per sons, as well. Some of the original bias against ASL
stemmed from a poor understanding of the nature of language and the false belief that
learning sign language inhibited the development of speech. There will be more on this
point later in the chapter.

Until the mentalist revolution in linguistics and psychology, i.e. the bringing back of the
concepts of mind and mentalism into psychology and linguistics
First-language learning

after the downfall of the anti-mentalist Behaviourists, which was spearheaded by Chomsky
in the 1960s, language was generally equated with speech in a behaviouristic type of
conception. With the advent of mentalism, lan guage began to be widely perceived as a kind
of knowledge in the mind that is related to, but exists independently of, its physical
manifestation in speech or sign. Such a conceptual separation was just what sign language
researchers needed for pursuing their investigations into ASL. They were then able to
formulate an ASL grammar for the mind, a mental grammar that was similar in essence to
that which hearing people were believed to have. Language, and not speech, became to be
regarded as the true distinguish ing human characteristic. The change started slowly in the
1960s but soon gathered momentum, and by the middle of the 1970s the proponents of ASL
began to succeed. Soon ASL was actively taught in a large number of schools for the deaf in
the United States and Canada. Sweden and other countries also followed a similar pattern
with their sign languages.

It was during this same period that, with the boost given to ASL by educators and
researchers, the ASL deaf community came out of the closet, so to speak. Signers began to
gain confidence and pride and to commun icate such feelings to the public at large.

Growing recognition and interest in sign language worldwide

Nowadays it is commonplace in many countries to see various TV pro grammes, meetings,

and special events with simultaneous interpreters present for the benefit of the deaf. Hearing
people, too, see this and again the idea is planted that signing is a language. But it was not
always so. Most countries were like Japan, where only in the past few years have things
started to change. It was the United States and Canada and many countries of the European
Community that took the lead in this respect.

Deaf pride in the USA

Denying deafness as an impairment

With the acceptance of ASL, the deaf community became more and more established. The
deaf community, with its own language, theatre, and other activities, became a source of
pride. Pride grew to an extent that a steadily increasing number of deaf people have said that
they would choose not to be hearing. They even deny that deafness is an impairment. To
them, the word ‘cure’ – indeed, the whole notion of deafness as an impairment – is
anathema. However, if deafness is not an impairment, then government is under no
obligation to help people who have this condition. This would be a significant financial loss.
Most members of the deaf community are prob ably not in agreement with the non-
impairment view.

How the deaf can communicate with the hearing and succeed in the workplace

The need for literacy

Once the problem of how deaf persons are to communicate with one another has been dealt
with satisfactorily (through an Independent Sign Language), the problem that remains is
how deaf people are to communicate with members of the dominant hearing community.
This is a different problem. Barring the very unlikely event that hearing people will learn
ISL on a mass scale, the burden falls on the deaf to acquire some means of communication
for use with hearing persons. In this regard two main approaches are avail able. One is
speech (through the Oral Approach), which, as we know, benefits only those who have a
moderate hearing loss. The other, little known, is the Steinberg Written Language
Approach. It is this latter approach that we shall be dealing with here.
The Distinction between reading and
written language

Reading
A person who knows a speech-based language and then learns to interpret the written
correspondences for that speech is doing what we call reading. The typical reader therefore
is a person who knows a speech-based language before learning to interpret writing. When
that person can interpret writing, then we can say that the person can read. This is the way
most hearing persons learn to read English or any other speech-based language. Such a
person is not a bilingual but a monolingual who can read.

Written language
A person who does not know a speech-based language, such as a deaf person, can also learn
to interpret writing. When that person can interpret writing, then we can say that the
person is interpreting a written language. Thus, if the person knows ASL and learns written
English, that person is bilingual. Written English is a complete language because, in the
course of learning it, the learner acquires the same vocabulary and syntax of the English
language as does a hearing person.