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... light tracing pattern in space, then asking the kids to draw what they saw, researchers found that the deaf kids were way ahead of the hearing kids. New findings on ASL support the efforts of linguists such as Bob Johnson. Johnson wants there to be education for the deaf beginning at infancy. Research by Helen Neville, at the Salk Institute, shows that children must learn a language -any language-during their first five years or so, before the brains neural connections are locked in place, or risk permanent linguistic impairment. What suffers is the ability to learn grammar (Liddell 199).
As the child becomes more mature, his or her brain organization becomes more rigid. When the child hits puberty it is almost complete. This is why Johnson is so concerned, because most deaf children do not begin learning sign language until late. Just being around deaf people alone has significant benefits and most of the children that are deaf parents can hear and are not familiar with ASL. Johnson notes that more than 90 percent of all deaf children have hearing parents.
The deaf children that have deaf parents have the luxury learning the language from a very young age when it is most efficient to learn. According to Liddell the average deaf 12 th-grader reads at the 4 th-grade level. This is why Johnson is wanting the children to begin to learn ASL in the crib, and schools teaching ASL. He believes through research that if English is the second language and ASL is taught first, then the students will learn English easier. Only six of the hundreds of school for the death are moving toward ASL-based instruction. The majority of deaf children are in mainstream school being taught by teachers that are not fluent in sign language.
American Sign Language is a living language that is still evolving. A sociolinguists named James Woodward studied ASL by observing it at a deaf school. He said he saw a great variation in the way people signed. Woodward later began to focus on social and ethnic dialects of ASL.
He found that people in the south would use older forms of ASL than people in the north. He specifically found that southern blacks use the oldest form of ASL. Just as I learned in one of my linguistic courses language changes over time. That does not differ with ASL. An example of this is the sign for home use to mean eat. It has now evolved into two taps on the cheek.
Another way that ASL has changed is where the signs take place, to keep them easy to understand. Signs formerly made at the center of the face moved toward its outside. This way its not only easier to see the signs, but its also easier to see the facial expression, which a crucial part of understanding sign language. The face is usually where an ASL user focuses, using their peripheral for the One thing I did not know about ASL is how important the facial expressions are. Signers will use certain facial expressions as grammatical markers. These different grammatical markers range from pursed lips to the expression that results from making the sound th.
This is one aspect of ASL that would seem to be extremely hard for an observer to pick up on. One example of how facial and body movement can result changing a sentence, is when the signer tilts his head forward and raises his eyebrows while signing. By doing this the signer makes the sentence a question. If the person also makes the th expression while signing, then this changes the verb with an adverb. Woodward believes that these slight changes were never noticed because the deaf people will sign like this to each other, but sign more of the English-like to people that can hear. The reason for this is because the deaf are an extremely close group that are very cautious about letting outsiders into their circle.
Woodward believes this is important to the deaf community because it helps them maintain social identity and group solidarity. The ability to use sign language and having it as your primary language has benefits other than communicating. Some of these advantages are being able to recognize different objects. The deaf have an easier time at distinguishing whether or not an object is the same, but rotated in space, than someone capable of hearing. Researchers have also found that deaf are able to distinguish faces better than non-deaf. I would now like to shift gears and focus on the structure of ASL and the distinctions between it and a language spoken verbally.
As we know, ASL is not a manual representation of English, with individual signs giving meaning of English words. Although, ASL is a complete language, with all the properties of other languages of the world, but one that has evolved independently of, and separately from, English (Nakamura 2). When looking at the different linguistic aspects of ASL we find many distinctions between it and other languages. First of all, the phonology of spoken language involves the use of the vocal organs to produce vowels and consonants that are structured in ways to constitute salient input to the auditory system (Luetke 232). Being a linguistic student, and writing to a linguistic professor, we are both aware of the different why sounds are classified in speech, although I was not familiar with the four basic articulatory parameters involved in ASL. The four parameters are hand configuration, or shape of each hand. (There are about 40 distinct handshakes).
Place of articulation, or the area on the signers body where the sign is produced. (There are about 20 distinct locations). Orientation of the articulator's, or the orientation of the hand in relation to the body. (There are about 10 distinct orientations). Movement, or the motion of the hands from one point to another in the signing space (Friedman 947). I was amazed to find that there were so many distinctive characteristics from a phonological standpoint in ASL. With this complex of parameters, I feel the deaf for sure should be taught ASL within the first five years of their life. The next linguistic aspect that differs between ASL and English is the morphological process.
The morphological process of English form and change words by adding prefixes or suffixes to a word. The process of adding prefixes or suffixes occurs in sequential, or linear, fashion. For example, tense is marked by adding an inflection to the end of the word, or word class can occur by adding a suffix to the end of the word (Gee 301). ASL morphology works different than English. According to Gee, ASL morphology is organized in a simultaneous rather than sequential fashion. That is, rather than adding prefixes or suffixes that extend the length of a word, ASL morphology operates by nesting the sign stem within dynamic movement contours.
These movement contours are no affixed to the beginning or end of the sign stem, but rather occur simultaneously within the sign. For example, a slower, single movement is associated with a particular set of verbs, whereas a faster, repetitive movement is associated with nouns (Gee 313). By the looks of ASL morphology, it seems as if the signers would be able to communicate just as effectively and efficiently as an English speaker. The next aspect of linguistics that separates ASL from English is the syntax.
The syntax in English is of course subject-verb-object. ASL has a S-V-O word order, but it does not always occur. Sign order in ASL is more variable than English word order, and it is governed by grammatical facial expressions, spatial syntax, and other non manual behaviors (Fischer 14). The first example of this that comes to mind from previous chapters is the use of facial expression. What I mean by this is facial expression and head positioning can be used to change word order by putting the strongest emphasized part of the sentence first. This is what Fischer is referring to when he says, This grammatical phenomenon is called topical ization, and it allows a signer to highlight the central idea of a sentence by positioning the most important information at the beginning of a sentence (Fischer 15).
Therefore, ASL does not always have S-V-O sentences. There sentences seem to be more situation dependent, instead of always having a standardized rule to abide Familiarizing myself with all aspects of American Sign Language has been an educational experience. I was interested in researching the controversial issues on whether or not ASL was considered a natural language or not. I also enjoyed reading about the research of people on how the hand placement affects grammar. There are many different parts of ASL that I was unaware of. One of these is how important facial expressions are to the signers.
I thought their main focus would be on the hands, but they rely on their peripheral vision for that. The research I did correlated to what I personally experienced with the my classmate. When I observed her she was very athletic and talented. She also had a very fast reflex time when we would do testing in labs. In my research findings I learned that signers have an advantage over non-deaf at recognizing faces and distinguishing objects in space. Lastly, I found the comparison between ASL and English to be interesting.
I thought this was interesting because I feel as if I have a good understanding of English and linguistics, but I was my primary focus was comparing it to ASL. When taking this course in linguistics I thought the syntax of the English language was complex. I now see that ASL syntax is probably just as complex. The reason why I think Asl's syntax complexity is equivalent to English's syntax is because there is no set pattern like S-V-O, therefore it becomes situation dependent. Unlike listening to someone in English, ASL requires much attention. You cannot put it on auto-pilot while someone is signing to you, like you can in English.
This assignment has opened my eyes to entire different language and has given me more motivation to learn Bibliography: Works Cited Ayers, Robert. Signs and manual communication systems: selection, standardization, and development. American Annals of the Deaf 142 (July 97): 90 - 105. Fischer, Scott. Influences on word order change in American Sign Language. Word order and word order change 86 (1993): 1 - 25.
Friedman, L. A. Space, time, and person reference in American Sign Language. Language 51 (1975): 940 - 961. Gee, John P, and William Goodhart. Nativization, linguistic theory, and deaf language acquisition.
Sign Language Studies 49 (1985): 291 - 342. Liddell, Stephan. American Sign Language: The phonological base. Sign Language Studies 64 (1989): 195 - 277. Lou, M.
W. The history of language use in education of the deaf in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Luetke-Stahlman, B. The benefit of oral English-only as compared with signed input to hearing-impaired students. Volta Review 90 (1988): 349 - 361.
Major, Greg. Simultaneous communication in the classroom: How well is English grammar represented? Sign Language Studies 23 (1979): 99 - 136. Nakamura, Karen. About American Sign Language. American Annals of the Deaf 145 (September 97): 80 - 96.
Oaks, Dallas D. Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications. Ft. Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
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Research essay sample on Facial Expressions Sign Language
