Summary

Psycholinguistics

THE DEAF AND LANGUAGE:

SIGN, ORAL, WRITTEN

By Group 1,

1. Dian Nanda Agriawan

2. Alwisidi
3. Muhammad Said Nasrullah
4. Ida Mursid
5. Minawati

Department of English Language Teaching

Faculty of Teacher Training and Education
Muhammadiyah University of Kendari
Kendari
2010
1. Sign Language: A True Language without Speech

Most of us have had the opportunity to experience sign language, if only to see it
occasionally in the corner of our TV screens. There we can see a person translating speech
into sign for the benefit of deaf and severely hearing-impaired viewers.

A sign language is true language because the language system allows a signer to
comprehend and produce an unrestricted number of grammatical sign sentences. Also, we
can all agree that people who communicate in speech do have language; but sound is not
an essential aspect of language. Language, of course, must depend on some physical mode
for its acquisition and use. The mode can be visual, as in signing, or even touch as in
language used by the deaf-blind (Helen Keller, criterion of language).

Research on sign languages seriously began for the most part in the 1960s when
linguistics and psycholinguists addressed themselves to this newly discovered area. The
finding showed that signers of such sing language as American Sign Language, French
Sign Language, British Sign Language and others can indeed communicate in sign
whatever is expressed in speech (Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965; Klima & Bellugi,
1979; and more recently, Slipe & Fischer, 1990). Other sign language, however, may be
incomplete syntactically or limited in terms in vocabulary. In Japan, for instance, where
the national government until recently prohibited the teaching and use of sign language in
public schools, standardization and vocabulary are problems.

Returning in the language criterion, not only can a fluent signer of a complete sign
language such as ASL sign whatever a speaker can say, but also the signer communicates
at about the same speed as a speaker does. The speed at which signers produce sentences
in a signed conversation tends to be the same as that at which speakers produce sentences
in a spoken conversation (Bellugi & Fischer, 1972).

2. Gestures of Hearing People Are Signs But Do Not Form A Language

Examination of a related means of communication that is used by gestures will be useful

before considering the essentials of sign language. Although gestures is necessary for the
reader to make this distinction, they are only collections of signs which 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: greeting: hello, goodbye – by moving the hands and arms; answers: yes, no, I
don’t know – by moving the head etc. Gestures are often similar but seldom universal.
Coming upon another community’s gestures may lead to confusion for an outside. Most
gestures are specific to cultural, linguistic, or geographic areas. Besides the general
gestures used in a culture, there are also restricted gestures which are known and used by
small groups. In television for instance, if you were an announcer presenting the news, and
the person in charge drew his or her index finger across the throat, you would bring your
talking to close. Ordinarily in the West and elsewhere this is a sign for slitting the throat
and implies death, the end.

Every speech community has its own distinctive gestures which are coordinated with
speech. While alone these gestures do not indicate a meaning, with speech they generally
do serve some function. For example beat. Beat is a common gesture, where one’s hand or
finger is kept in motion and is synchronized with what a person is saying. According to
McNeil (1987) he stated that the purpose of beat is basically to emphasize the discourse
function of concurrent speech.

3. Speech-Based Sign Languages

Sign language based on the speech of ordinary language can be of two different kinds: one
which represents the morphemes of speech and one which represents spelling. Every
signer of whatever system must learn so as to be able to express proper nouns such as the
names of people or place. Consequently, signers must be master finger spelling; letter by
letter and or morpheme by morpheme.

According to the system words are represented by spelling out letter by letter of
individual signs, where each sign represents a letter of the alphabet. For example, hand and
finger configurations are used to indicate letters, such as making a V with index and
middle fingers. So that, words and entire sentences can be communicated in this letter by
letter method (Let see in appendixes: Figure 1. Finger spelling).

4. Independent Sign Language (ISLs) such as American Sign Language (ASL)

The sign of a ISLs 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.

At the word level of an ordinary language, there are not only words which differ
completely in meaning from one another, but also words which are very much related, for
example the words go, went, and gone. There are, then, uninflected forms of signs which
can be defined by the features of place, configuration and movement, with variations in
movement providing the means for morphological variation and changes in aspect (Let see
in appendixes: Some British Sign Language Vocabulary).

5. The Process of Learning ASL

In fact, most deaf children are born into hearing families and also hearing parents often
discouraged from learning sign language. Advocates of the Oral Approach (see next sheet)
denounced sign language, arguing that it would reduce the effectiveness of speech training.

According to Newport and Supalla (1980), a number of such studies have shown that
there is a substantial effect of age on the acquisition of ASL: native and early ASL learners
show much more fluency, consistency, and complexity in the grammatical structures of the
language, and more extensive and rapid processing abilities, than do those people who
have acquired ASL later in Life (Emmorey, 1991; Mayberry & Fischer, 1989; Newport,
1990).

6. The Oral Approach and Total Communication

The general public aside, who is it that the ASL people have been struggling with for
recognition over the years? These have been 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.

The Oral Approach focuses on the teaching of speech production. Its secondary
focus is on speech comprehension. In this approach children from the age of 2 or 3 years
onwards are specially trained in the skill of articulating speech sounds. For the most part,
however, the successful are the children who have only a moderate hearing loss. Those
with more severe impairment typically fare poorly. Because in order to produce speech
sound, on 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
judgment. Most deaf persons are not congenitally mute but mute because they do not know
how to utter appropriate speech sounds.

The comprehension of speech is usually fostered through both exploiting any

residual hearing that learners may have and the teaching of speech-reading. However,
speech-reading or commonly known as lip-reading is not easy learnt because many
English sounds are particularly difficult to differentiate visually; for example /a/ (lost/, /e/
(lest), /i/ (list). Logically, the better the deaf person is in hearing, the better that person will
be in both speaking and speech-reading.

The drawback of the oral approach should include sign language in heir curriculum
along with speech training. The program is called Total Communication where it spread in
the 1970s in the US, Canada and other countries. Consequently using Total
Communication, written language must be taught.

7. The Sign Language vs. Oral Approach Controversy

It was in the 1880s that the Oral Approach advocates defeated Sign Language advocates.
Subsequently, in the US and other countries, it is the Oral Approach which 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.

The rational of oral advocates in excluding sign language is 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). Also,
one formidable advocate of the oral approach is Alexander Graham Bell where 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.

8. 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 denied
reflected the opinion of many hearing persons, as well. Some of the original bias against
ASL stemmed from a poor understanding of the nature of language. Most of the bias,
however, stemmed from the false belief that learning sign language inhibited the
development of speech.

Nowadays it is commonplace in many countries to see various TV programs,

meetings, and special events with simultaneous interprets present for the benefit of the
deaf. Hearing people planted that signing is a language. United States and Canada and
many countries of the European Community took the lead in this respect.

9. Written Language Bilingual Approach for Complete Communication

Writing in other hand, presents the deaf person as an equal in that mode of communication.
When given a pad, it is easy for hearing persons to communicate with deaf persons. The
essential idea of written language approach is that the meaningful written forms in
ordinary speech-based language, such as English or Spanish, with its words, phrases, and
sentences, are to be learned initially in the environment. Even it written language is
learned with the aid of sign, the final knowledge product in separate language.

One of the advantages of learning of writing language is compatible with other

approach. Written language can be taught in conjunction with either sign language or the
oral method, without any injury to the integrity of those approaches.

10. A Program for Teaching Written Language

There are four phases of teaching programs. They are;

First is word familiarization. Words are written on blank cards by the instructor and are
attached to familiar objects or pictures in all of the rooms that the child frequents.

Second is word identification. The children learn which particular written words are
associated with which particular objects. It is useful to the children remember a particular
written in long term memory.

Third is phrase and sentence identification. It is similar with word identification except
that larger linguistic are introduced.

Fourth are paragraphs and stories. Both of paragraph and stories is largest written
linguistic unit. Activities involving paragraph may be used from source other than books.
Thus, stories with as few as one or two paragraphs may be composed, where there are only
a few sentences in each paragraph. For example:
Story 1: (a) Alice dropped the egg. (b) It landed on the dog.

Story 2: (a) Mike was riding a bicycle. (b) He hit a rock. (c) The bicycle turned over. (d)
Mike was okay.

The significant written language knowledge can be acquired directly through the
medium of writing by very young children who have had a profound hearing loss at or
near birth. Since the Writing Language teaching program can be applied successfully by
ordinary parents in the home, there is good reason to believe that it can also be
successfully applied by teachers in school. Undoubtedly, young children would benefit
most being taught written language both in the home and at school.

References:

Steinberg, Danny D., Nagata, Hiroshi., Aline, David P., 2001. Second Edition. Pearson
Education Limited. Longman.

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