1989 - Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks
125. Bellugi, 1980, pp. 135-136.
These difficulties, which do not diminish with use, are due to fundamental neurological limitations—in particular, of short-term memory and cognitive processing. None of these difficulties occurs with ASL, which with its spatial devices is perfectly adapted to a visual mode, and can be easily signed and understood at high speed. The overloading of short-term memory and cognitive capacity that occurs with signed English in deaf adults is experienced as difficulty and strain. But in deaf children, who still have the capacity to create grammatical structures—so Supalla hypothesizes—the cognitive difficulties involved in trying to learn signed speech force the children to create their own linguistic structures, to create or evolve a spatial grammar.
If deaf children are exposed only to signed English, Supalla has further shown, they may exhibit ‘impaired potential for natural language acquisition and processing,’ impairment of their capacity to create and comprehend grammar, unless they are able to create their own linguistic structures. Fortunately, being children, and still at a ‘Chomskian’ age, they are able to create their own linguistic structures, their own spatial grammar. They resort to doing this in order to ensure their own linguistic survival.
These findings on the spontaneous origination of Sign, or Sign-like linguistic structures, in children may cast a very important light on the origin and evolution of Sign in general.
For it appears as if the nervous system, given the constraints of language in a visual medium, and the physiological limitations of short-term memory and cognitive processing, has to evolve the sort of linguistic structures, the sort of spatial organization, we see in Sign. And there is strong circumstantial support for this in the fact that all indigenous signed languages—and there are many hundreds, all over the world, which have evolved separately and independently wherever there are groups of deaf people 126—all indigenous signed languages have much the same spatial structure.
126. It should be made clear that no sign language can be considered as ‘primitive’ compared to any other sign language (just as no extant spoken language is more ‘primitive’ than any other). But it is sometimes felt in the United States that ASL is by far the best sign language in the world—the best organized, the richest, the most expressive, etc.—an attitude which has led to a certain amount of ASL ‘imperialism’ (causing other native sign languages, in smaller countries, to defer to, and even be replaced by, ASL). But this is a hierarchic concept. In fact, all languages, whether signed or spoken, no matter how new, or how limited their geographic distribution, have the same potentials, the same range of possibility—none can be dismissed as ‘primitive’ or ‘defective.’ Thus British Sign Language is fully the equal of ASL; Irish Sign Language is fully the equal of both; and so too is Icelandic Sign Language (even though there are only seventy deaf people in Iceland).
None of them resembles signed English, or signed speech, in the least. All have, beneath their specific differences, some generic resemblance to ASL. There is no universal sign language, but there are, it seems, universals in all sign languages, universals not of meaning, but of grammatical form. 127
127. The hundreds of sign languages that have arisen spontaneously all over the world are as distinct and strongly differentiated as the world’s range of spoken languages. There is no one universal sign language. And yet there may be universals in signed languages, which help to make it possible for their users to understand one another far more quickly than users of unrelated spoken languages could understand each other. Thus a monolingual Japanese would be lost in Arkansas, as a monolingual American would be lost in rural Japan. But a deaf American can make contact relatively swiftly with his signing brothers in Japan, Russia, or Peru—he would hardly be lost at all. Signers (especially native signers) are adept at picking up, or at least understanding, other signed languages, in a way which one would never find among speakers (except, perhaps, in the most gifted). Some understanding will usually be established within minutes, accomplished mostly by gesture and mime (in which signers are extraordinarily proficient). By the end of a day, a grammarless pidgin will be established. And within three weeks, perhaps, the signer will possess a very reasonable knowledge of the other sign language, enough to allow detailed discussion on quite complex issues. There was an impressive example of this in August 1988, when the National Theater of the Deaf visited Tokyo, and joined the Japan Theater of the Deaf in a joint production. ‘ ‘The deaf actors in the American and Japanese acting companies were soon chatting,’ reported David E. Sanger in The New York Times (August 29,1988), ‘and by late afternoon during one recent rehearsal it became clear they were already on each other’s wavelengths.’
There is good reason to suppose (though the evidence is circumstantial rather than direct) that general linguistic competence is genetically determined and is essentially the same in all human beings. But the particular form of grammar—what Chomsky calls ‘surface’ grammar (whether this be the grammar of English or Chinese or Sign)—is determined by the experience of the individual; it is not a genetic endowment but an epigenetic achievement. It is ‘learned,’ or perhaps one should say, for we are dealing with something primitive and preconscious, it evolves through the interaction of a general (or abstract) linguistic competence and the particularities of experience—an experience which, in the deaf, is distinctive, indeed unique, because it is in a visual mode.
What Gee and Goodhart, and Samuel Supalla, observe is an evolution, a startling (and radical) modification of grammatical forms, under the influence of this visual necessity. They describe a change, a grammatical form changing visibly before the eyes, becoming spatialized, as signed English is ‘turned into’ an ASL-like language. They depict an evolution of grammatical forms—but an evolution occurring within the course of a few months.
Language is actively modified, the brain itself is actively modified, as it develops a wholly new capacity to ‘linguisticize’ space (or to spatialize language). As the brain does this, it simultaneously develops all the other visual-cognitive, but nonlinguistic, enhancements that Bellugi and Neville have described. There must be physiological and (could we but see them) anatomical shiftings and reorganizations in the micro-structure of the brain. Neville conceives the brain as having, at first, a great neuronal redundancy and plasticity, and of this being subsequently ‘pruned’ by experience, here reinforcing synapses, connections between nerve cells, there inhibiting or suppressing them, according to the competing pressures of different sensory inputs. It is clear that genetic endowment alone cannot explain the full connectional complexity of the nervous system—whatever invariants are predetermined, additional diversity emerges during development. This postnatal development, or epigenesis, is the central concern of Jean-Pierre Changeux’s work. 128
128. Changeux, 1985.
But a more radical suggestion, indeed a wholly different way of thinking, has recently been put forward by Gerald Edelman. 129
129. Edelman, 1987.
The unit of selection for Changeux is the individual neuron; the unit of selection for Edelman is the neuronal group, and it is only at this level, with selection of different neuronal groups or populations under competitive pressures, that evolution (as distinct from mere growth or development) may be said to occur. This allows Edelman to produce a model which is essentially biological, indeed Darwinian, in nature. 130
130. This point is made by Francis Crick in a recent article on neural networks (Crick, 1989). Crick describes a computational model, NET-talk, which, given an English text it has never seen before, babbles at first, having only random connections, but soon learns to pronounce words with 90 percent accuracy; thus, Crick observes, ‘it has learned the rules of English pronunciation, which are notoriously not straightforward, in a tacit manner, from examples only, and not because the rules have been explicitly embodied in some program.’ What might seem to be a ‘Chomskian’ task, albeit a trivial one compared to the achievement of grammar, is here accomplishe
Addendum 1990: Such a network has very recently been devised (by B.P. Yuhas) to read lips, by estimating vowels based on mouth shape, and positions of lips, teeth, and tongue. This neural network, combined with conventional speech recognition systems, may one day produce a system which is fast enough and flexible enough for practical use (Science 247:1414, March 23, 1990).
Darwin conceives of natural selection occurring in populations in response to environmental pressures. Edelman sees this as continuing in the organism (he speaks here of ‘somatic selection’), determining the individual development of the nervous system. The fact that populations of nerve cells, and not merely individual cells, are involved allows far more complex potentials for change.
Edelman’s theory provides a detailed picture of how neuronal ‘maps’ can be formed, which allow an animal to adapt (without innate programs or instruction) to wholly new perceptual challenges, to create or construct new perceptual forms and categorizations, new orientations, new approaches to the world. This is precisely the situation of the deaf child: he is flung into a perceptual (and cognitive and linguistic) situation for which there is neither genetic precedent nor teaching to assist him; and yet, given half a chance, he will develop radically new forms of neural organization, neural mappings, which will allow him to master the language-world, and articulate it, in a quite novel way. It is difficult to think of a more dramatic example of somatic selection, of neural Darwinism, in action. 131
131. It will be evident that I have moved around somewhat between a ‘nativist’ (a Chomskian) and an ‘evolutionist’ (an Edelmanian) viewpoint. I must confess to being emotionally attracted to a Chomskian, or Cartesian, or Platonic idealism, to the notion of our language capacities, our powers of intellectual apprehension, all our perceptual powers, being innate—and, in the most general terms, to the notion of Design; but my observations of language acquisition, and of all developments in the individual or the species, tell me a much untidier story, tell me that nothing in nature (or animate, nature) is ‘designed’ in advance, and that everything evolves, or emerges, under the pressures of contingency and selection. Thus my general movement, as I have been writing, is from a nativist towards an evolutionist standpoint. Yet the study of Sign, and its acquisition in childhood, fascinatingly, seems to give strong support to both points of view, and perhaps the two are not incompatible.
To be deaf, to be born deaf, places one in an extraordinary situation; it exposes one to a range of linguistic possibilities, and hence to a range of intellectual and cultural possibilities, which the rest of us, as native speakers in a world of speech, can scarcely even begin to imagine. We are neither deprived nor challenged, linguistically, as the deaf are: we are never in danger of languagelessness, or severe linguistic incompetence; but nor do we discover, or create, a startingly new language.
The unspeakable experiment of King Psammetichos—who had two children raised by shepherds who never spoke to them, in order to see what (if any) language they would speak naturally—is repeated, potentially, with all children born deaf. 132
132. The experiment of King Psammetichos, a seventh-century B.C. Egyptian ruler, was described by Herodotus. Other monarchs, including Charles IV of France, James IV of Scotland, and the notorious Akbar Khan, have repeated the experiment. Ironically, in the case of Akbar Khan, the infants were given over, not to shepherds who were forbidden to speak, but to deaf nurses who did not speak (but who, unknown to Akbar, signed). When, at the age of twelve, these children were brought to Akbar’s court, none of them (it is true) spoke, but all of them signed. There was, it was clear, no inborn or ‘Adamic’ language, and if no language was used, no language was acquired; but if any language was used, even a signed language, this would become the language of the children.
A small number—perhaps 10 percent of these—are born of deaf parents, exposed to Sign from the start, and become native signers. The rest must live in an aural-oral world, neither biologically, nor linguistically, nor emotionally well-equipped to deal with them. Deafness as such is not the affliction; affliction enters with the breakdown of communication and language. If communication cannot be achieved, if the child is not exposed to good language and dialogue, we see all the mishaps Schlesinger describes—mishaps at once linguistic, intellectual, emotional, and cultural. These mishaps are imposed, to a larger or smaller degree, upon the majority of those born deaf: ‘most deaf children,’ as Schein remarks, ‘grow up like strangers in their own households.’ 133
133. Schein, 1984, p. 131. Shanny Mow, in a brief autobiography excerpted by Leo Jacobs, describes this all-too-typical estrangement of a deaf child in his own home:
You are left out of the dinner table conversation. It is called mental isolation.
While everyone else is talking and laughing, you are as far away as a lone Arab on a desert that stretches along every horizon…You thirst for connection. You suffocate inside but you cannot tell anyone of this to. You get the impression nobody understands or cares…You are not granted even the illusion of participation…
You are expected to spend fifteen years in the straitjacket of speech training and lip-reading…your parents never bother to put in an hour a day to learn sign language or some part of it. One hour of twenty-four that can change a life time for you (Jacobs, 1974, pp. 173-174).
The only deaf children not liable to suffer such cruel estrangements even in their own households are those who are born of deaf (and signing) parents—such children are (in the words of a deaf friend with hearing parents) ‘another species.’ Deaf children of deaf parents can enjoy, from the start, a full communication and relation with their parents; they acquire fluent language as easily and automatically as hearing children do, and at the same crucial time (in the third year of life): their Sign has a precision and a richness no non-native signer can acquire. They are more likely, very early, to meet other deaf adults and deaf children, to enter fully into an understanding community. They grow up with a firm sense of confidence, and of personal and cultural identity—their lives have been organized, from the start, around ‘a different center’ (Padden and Humphries, 1988). Many of the ‘elite’ in the Deaf world are born of deaf parents, and sometimes, indeed, come from large, multi-generational deaf families—this was the case with all four student leaders of the Gallaudet revolt.
A different, and unique, position is occupied by the hearing children of deaf parents, who grow up with both Sign and speech as native languages, and may be equally at ease in both deaf and hearing worlds. They often become interpreters, and they are ideally suited for this, because they can interpret not only the language, but the culture, of one world to another.
Yet none of this has to happen. Although the dangers that threaten a deaf child are very great, they are, mercifully, entirely preventable. To be the parents of a deaf child, or of twins, or of a blind child, or of a prodigy, demands a special resilience and resourcefulness. 134
134. Hearing parents of deaf children face especially delicate and anguished issues of belonging and identity. Thus one such mother, writing to me of her own child who had been deafened at the age of five months by meningitis, wrote: ‘Does this mean that overnight he has suddenly become a stranger to us, that somehow he no longer belongs to us but to the deaf world? That he is now part of the deaf community, that we have no claim on him?’ This fear that their deaf child will become estranged from them, will be taken away from them by the deaf community, is one which a good many parents of deaf children express; and it is a fear which may move them to bind the child to themselves, and to deny him access, while he is young, to Sign and other deaf people. ‘While his care and nurture is in our hands,’ continues my correspondent,
There are two related issues here. One has to do with parents being able to ‘let go’ of their children: all parents must do this, but it may need to be done at an earlier age, in some ways, with a deaf child, so that he may start on his own, so-special development. The other issue has to do with the deaf community. A deaf child does not need to be ‘protected’ from the deaf community; the deaf community is not lying in wait to steal him from his parents. On the contrary, the deaf community is the greatest resource there is for a deaf child, and one which can be (with the parents’ cooperation) a liberating force, allowing the child to acquire language and develop in his own way. It requires a special generosity of spirit for parents to realize this for them to perceive their deaf child as he is, to unshackle him from their own wishes and needs, and to allow him to develop as a free and independent—though different—being. The deaf child needs a double identity. Allowing this allows mutual respect and love, whereas forbidding it is all too likely to lead to the estrangement of which Schein and Mow speak.
Many parents of the deaf feel powerless in the face of such a communication barrier with their child, and it is a tribute to the adaptability of both parents and child that this potentially devastating barrier can be overcome.
Finally, still too rarely, there are the deaf who fare well, at least in terms of realizing their innate capacities. Crucial to this is the acquisition of language at a ‘normal’ early age this first language can be Sign or speech (as we see with Charlotte and Alice), for it is language, rather than any particular language, that kindles linguistic competence and, with this, intellectual competence too. As the parents of deaf children have to be, in a sense, ‘super-parents,’ so deaf children themselves have to be, even more obviously, ‘super-children.’ Thus Charlotte is already, at six, a fluent reader, with a real and unforced passion for reading. She is already, at six, bilingual and bicultural—whereas most of us spend our whole lives in one language and one culture. Such differences can be positive and creative, can enrich human nature and culture. And this, if you will, is the other side of deafness—the special powers of visuality and Sign. The acquisition of Sign grammar occurs in much the same way, and at much the same age, as the grammar of speech—we may take it that the deep structure of both is identical. The propositional power of both is identical. The formal properties of both are identical, even though they involve, as Petitto and Bellugi say, different types of signals, different kinds of information, different sensory systems, different memory structures, and perhaps different neural structures. 135