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Example research essay topic: Sign Language Left Hemisphere - 1,949 words

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What would life be like with a severe disability? Physical disabilities seem to be very stressful because many of them develop overtime, but the majority of them do not affect ones communication. The thought of being deaf seems to be far fetched to me, however it could occur under certain circumstances and like other people, I would have to adjust accordingly. Although being deaf is a disability in which most are born with, its the disability with the biggest impact on ones way of communicating.

Im amazed to think that people become accustomed to communicating other than verbally. This phenomenon is possible through American Sign Language or ASL. Today American Sign Language is a complex visual-spatial language that is used by the Deaf community in the United States and English-speaking parts of Canada. It is also considered linguistically complete, natural language. ASL is the native language of many Deaf men and women, as well as some hearing children born into deaf families. ASL has changed the lives of the deaf population and has opened doors to those not deaf for a career opportunity in teaching and interpreting it.

Im interested in ASL and would enjoy learning it. I was frustrated to find out ASL was not considered an alternate course to my foreign language credits. Im going to explore this topic and find out whether or not it could be technically considered a foreign language. I would like to give an in-depth look at all aspects of sign language and compare it to languages spoken verbally.

Before I discuss my research findings on ASL, I would like to discuss what Ive personally experienced from it. Last semester I had a classmate that was deaf and she had a ASL translator come to class each day. This was very interesting, because it was a Motor Learning course in Exercise and Sport Sciences. I was interested in observing here cognitive motor skills and seeing if she differed at all.

The only way in which I saw here differing from any other student is she was probably ahead of everyone. I was also amazed to see her translator keep up with the professor. The professor talked fast and the translator was able to keep up with no problem, and the student looked as if she understood everything. One day in lab, the professor had the student teach the class the ASL alphabet and about fifteen basic words. I found this to be an interesting learning experience from an ASL standpoint, not motor learning. The professors main objective was to look at the results from a motor learning standpoint, so it served for two purposes.

We also have a friend of the family in San Antonio that is a policeman named Steve. Steve has been on the police force for about twenty five years and knows English and Spanish. Steve once had to report to a situation that involved a deaf person. Steve said he had never felt so helpless, and a week after this incident he enrolled in an ASL class at UTSA. Steve now has a good understanding on how to use ASL in case he ever comes upon this type of situation again. Hearing Steves story and being involved directly with a classmate who knows ASL, has given me much curiosity on the subject.

French sign language first came about in the United States on April 15, 1817, in Hartford. This is the first time America established a school for the deaf. Eventually the French sign language was changed into what we know today as American Sign Language. The new style of sign language created much controversy.

Anti-signers argued that ASL let the deaf talk only to the deaf; they must learn to speak and to lip-read. Pro-signers pointed out that, through sign, the deaf learned to read and write English (Oaks 314). I think the anti-signers are being unfair. According to Oaks only 93 percent of deaf schoolchildren can lip-read only one in ten everyday sentences in English. Later in 1880 an international meeting of educators of the deaf were absent the use of sign language in schools was put to an end. This was largely due to Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone), which came as a surprise considering he was married to a woman who denied her own deafness.

Almost one hundred years later, a new federal law mandated mainstreaming. This law was beneficial to some parents because it allowed them to teach their deaf children at home, instead of sending off to schools, where they didnt know what to do with them. I feel bad for these children because theyre isolated and they feel as if there are none other like them. In reality there are many deaf out there that need to be given the opportunity to be able to communicate through sign language. For a long time American Sign Language has been looked at as a form of pidgin English. Until recently, when the true meaning of ASL was discovered by Bill Stokoe in 1955.

This discovery came about when Stokoe went to Gallaudet University in Washington D. C. , which is the worlds only liberal arts university for deaf people. Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, and was also enrolled in a signing course. Stokoe noticed the students were doing their signs different from the teacher. Stokoe was taught a code in which each movement of the hand illustrated the meaning of a word. With the thought in mind of people considering sign language to only be a pidgin, Stokoe saw it differently.

Stokoe saw the students usage of the sign to be more meaningful and detailed. This triggered the ideal of whether or not deaf people actually have a genuine language. Many educators would disagree with Stokoe and claim that sign language is unlike English, because its not a natural language. These educators went on to say that sign language is not a natural language since its not spoken. Stokoe's response to this argument was that sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space and that language is not mouth stuff - its brain stuff (Oaks 312).

This response was straight to the point and clear. I agree with Stokoe, I understand that there are many contributing factors that make a language, however in order to produce any form of American Sign Language does not have any grammatical similarities to English and should not be considered in any way to be a gestural form of English. Some people describe ASL as a gestural language. This is not correct according to Robert Ayers who says that hand gestures are only one component of ASL. Facial features such as eyebrow motion and lip-mouth movements are also significant in ASL as they form a crucial part of the grammatical system.

In addition, ASL makes use of the space surrounding the signer to describe places and persons that are not present (Ayers 17). A person by the name of Ursula Bellugi is investigating ASL from a scientific approach at the Salk Institute, a futuristic complex of concrete labs in San Diego. This is where Bellugi found that ASL uses grammar to regulate its flow. An example of this is in a conversation a signer might make the sign for Joe at an arbitrary spot in space.

Now that spot stands for Joe. By pointing to it, the signer creates the pronoun he or him, meaning Joe. A sign moving toward the spot means something done to him. A sign moving away from the spot means an action by Joe, something he did (Lou 83).

Bellugi later went on to focus on whether or not language capability is innate or is it acquired from our environment? Bellugi felt that if ASL is a true language then our ability for language must be built in at birth, whether we express it with our mouth or our hands. Linguistics has always had the rule that all natural languages words are arbitrary. In English there is no relation between the sound of the word dog and a dog itself, and a word that sounds as its name like slurp are very rare. Likewise, if ASL follows the same principles, its words should not be pictures. But ASL does have many words with obvious meanings.

According to Lou, In ASL, tree is an arm upright from the elbow, representing a trunk, with the fingers spread to show the crown. Bellugi had a toddler at the age of two and her mom come in to the research lab and observe the toddlers behavior. When the deaf toddler would point at her torso it meant I and when she would point at the mothers torso it meant you. Just like the non-deaf child the deaf child would get confused with pronouns such as you and I. Bellugi found that deaf toddlers have no trouble pointing. Although pointing a finger in ASL is linguistic, not Most linguists accepted sign languages as natural languages by the 1980 s.

They saw American Sign Language as powerful and as spoken ones. When comparing sign language to words spoken verbally, there are many similarities in wordplay and poetry. Signer create handshakes and movements to give meaningful puns, just like any other language. A typical pun in sign language goes like this: a fist near the forehead and a flip of the index finger upward means that one understands. But if the little finger flipped, its a joke meaning one understands a little (Marmor 120). A man by the name of Clayton Valli has done extensive research on poetry in ASL.

Valli found that repetition of hand shape provides rhyming, while meter occurs in the timing and type of movement. When doing research at the American Theatre of the Deaf Valli found that when using sign language in poetry and theatre, some people did it with a much more freer movement than normal signing. With others, he found that rhythm and tempo were more of their concerns, as opposed to spatial considerations. The way in which sign language is performed gives great opportunity for researchers to study the brain along with language.

Spoken languages are produced by largely unobservable movements of the vocal apparatus and received through the brains auditory system. ASL, by contrast, is delivered through highly visible movements of the arms, hands and face, and is received through the brains visual system (Marmor 128). This gives researchers a better understanding on how to go about testing different areas of the biological basis of language. As we all know the left hemisphere of the brain controls language, while the right hemisphere controls visual space.

Researchers knew that sign language was expressed spatially, but were unsure as to where they might be centered. In order to find out the researchers studied lifelong deaf signers who had suffered brain damage as adults. After the damage had occurred in their left hemisphere, the signers could shrug, point, shake their heads and make other gestures, but they lost the ability to sign. On the other hand, signers with right-hemisphere damage signed as well as ever, but spatial arrangements confused them. An example of this is that one of the subjects with damage to her right hemisphere couldnt perceive anything to her left. Although her visual spacing was not functioning properly this person was able to sign perfectly with both sides of the body.

This showed the researchers in this study that language is for sure centered in the left hemisphere. As expected, through research they found that learning American Sign Language has an advantage over verbal languages. Through a test of showing children a moving...


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Research essay sample on Sign Language Left Hemisphere

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