SIGN LANGUAGE

A language employed by those with impaired hearing, whose modality is the use of gesture rather than sound. Sign language is based on three components: the place where the sign is made, the shape and angle of the hand(s) and the movement of the hand(s).

Historically, many sign languages evolved naturally within the communities that use them. This has given rise to a distinctive American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Australian Sign language and so on. It has also meant that Sign is an independent linguistic system. It is not simply a translation of speech into gesture in the way that writing is a translation of speech into script. ASL and BSL differ from standard dialects of English in a number of ways, particularly in the way they mark syntactic relations. They do not employ suffixed inflections: there are no specific signs for-ed,-ing etc. They do not have articles and sometimes modify a lexical sign in situations where English would use function words. Current thinking stresses the importance of equipping children early with a means of self-expression in the form of Sign. Fluent signers thus acquire competence in a first language which has no spoken or written form. When they later acquire English as a second language, they have to master not only a different linguistic system but also two new modalities (speech and writing).

 Sign is of psycholinguistic interest for a number of reasons:

Sign originally developed naturally and independently. The situation has been compared with the way in which creoles develop from pidgins. The outcome of both processes is a fully-fledged language which appears to have been acquired on the basis of incomplete input. This lends support to nativisation theory, which holds that, in the absence of linguistic input, an innate biological programme drives the acquisition process.

Concrete evidence of how Sign develops was obtained when Nicaragua set up its first educational programme for deaf learners in 1980, with instruction based on lip-reading. Lacking any formal sign system, the learners communicated with each other outside the classroom by means of simple miming gestures (homesigns) which they had used at home to hearing relatives. Gradually these developed into a set of signs which the whole community shared and recognised.

Some ten years later, a new intake of deaf students arrived, learned the sign system of the older ones and greatly amplified it with a number of syntactic features including markers of word class and verb agreement and a procedure for pronoun reference. Thus, a new sign language emerged in two generations of learners, just as the creolisation model would predict.

There is some evidence that there may be a critical period for sign language acquisition. Those who acquire Sign young appear to make fewer mistakes of form while they are learning. An older age of acquisition seems to limit ultimate attainment, with a greater likelihood of grammatical inaccuracy and of problems in sentence recall.

Sign uses a different modality from that of conventional languages. If it could be shown that the acquisition of Sign is markedly different from that of speech, it would challenge the notion that language acquisition is supported by a universal innately acquired mechanism. It would also suggest that language is part of general cognitive processing (and thus affected by the modality in which it operates) rather than a separate modular faculty. The current state of evidence indicates certain strong similarities between the acquisition of signing by children of deaf parents and the acquisition of spoken language, but there are also differences. Both hearing and deaf children babble vocally; but there is said to be a higher incidence of manual ‘babbling’ among deaf children with deaf parents. There is evidence that many deaf children acquire their first sign words earlier than children acquiring spoken language; however, this may be due to the fact that signing demands less precise motor control than speaking. Whereas hearing children manifest a sudden vocabulary spurt at a certain stage in their development, vocabulary acquisition among signers tends to be more gradual. On the other hand, there are some striking similarities in the content of these early vocabularies, which are nearly identical across the two groups. There are also similarities in the way in which conceptual meanings (e.g. the notion of DOG) become over-generalised. One might expect that signs which are iconic (i.e. related in some visual way to the entity they refer to) would be easier to master than those which are purely symbolic; but they do not appear to be acquired ahead of others.

There appears to be a relatively consistent order of acquisition for the forms of signing just as there is in phonology, though there is some variation. Of the three aspects of sign form, hand position is mastered the most readily and hand shape gives the most difficulty.

The resemblances between the two acquisition routes become particularly striking at the two-word stage. Deaf children learn to combine words just as their hearing peers do. They appear to discover the same semantic relationships– and do so in roughly the same order.

Sign has a different linguistic structure from English. If children have been taught Sign first, they effectively come to English as a second language. When they write, their errors of syntax and spelling are often indistinguishable from those of a foreign learner. Their writing manifests features which may derive from structural differences between Sign and English. They often have serious difficulties with function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs) and with inflectional suffixes. In reading, they are easily fazed by non standard word orders (Mary was contacted by John). Word order is flexible in Sign; but signers seem to expect English to adhere quite strictly to its standard SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) sequence. In sum, there is some evidence that performance in the second language (English) is constrained by transfer from the first (Sign) despite the difference of modalities. On the other hand, some of these errors are also found with non-signing deaf learners.

See also: Creolisation, Critical period, Deafness, Nativisation hypothesis

 Further reading: Bonvillian (1999); Klima and Bellugi (1979); Strong (1988)

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Problems with the dictionary view

The dictionary view

Dictionaries versus encyclopaedias

The encyclopaedic view of meaning

Embodiment and conceptual structure summary

Schematic systems

Semantic structure

Conceptual structure

Image schemas and abstract thought

Properties of image schemas

What is an image schema?

Image schemas