An Alphabet on Hand: The Acquisition of Fingerspelling in Deaf Children

SLS 47 Summer 1985 AN ALPHABET ON HAND: THE ACQUISITION OF FINGERSPELLING IN DEAF CHILDREN Carol A. Padden Barbara Le Master We here report on a preliminary study of the acquisition of fingerspelling, a manual system for representing the alphabet, by young Deaf children whose first language in the home is American Sign Language (ASL). Unlike ASL, a natural language historically and structurally unrelated to spoken or written English, fingerspelling is composed of 26 distinct hand displays, one for each letter of the alphabet. Fingerspelling a word involves the rapid execution of a sequence of hand configurations, one for each letter of the word being represented. In Deaf families young Deaf children are exposed to fingerspelling used by their parents and older siblings at an early age and begin to fingerspell themselves long before they are able to read and write, and even before they are aware of the correspondence between fingerspelling and print. We raise here a central question about the process of learning systems that correspond to, but are not, natural languages -- such systems as fingerspelling and writing. This paper provides a first step toward addressing this question by examining features of Deaf children's learning to fingerspell. Like Chomsky (1971) and Read (1975), who studied writing in very young hearing children, we find that Deaf children begin thinking about fingerspelling at an early age, and indeed begin using the system before they attend school and learn about written English. We have found a number of intriguing similarities between very young children fingerspelling and very young children writing that cannot be due to the system's common link to print, for the reason that at this age children in neither group can yet read, and in particular, Deaf children are not yet able to associate fingerspelled letters with their corresponding written characters. On the surface, fingerspelling might seem to offer interesting possibilities for the study of auxiliary systems. Unlike speech and print, fingerspelling and signed languages are not cross-modal but intra-modal. Speech employs the vocal channel and print involves 1985 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 P.&L. : 162 manipulation of an instrument (pencil, keyboard, finger, etc.), but fingerspelling and signing both employ the hands and use many of the same hand configurations. One might propose that because of the similarities in form between fingerspelling and signing, learning fingerspelling would create different possibilities. Although we do not have yet sufficient longitudinal data to compare learning to write and learning to fingerspell, we offer here some preliminary observations about their similarities. Data in this paper are drawn from videotaped observations of six Deaf children at various ages: DD at 2 years, 3 months (2;3), SS at 2;9 and later at 2;11,. VV at 4;7 through 4;8 and at 4;9, KK at 4;9 and later at 4;11, LL at 5;0, and the sixth child, HH, beginning at 7;9 to 7;10 and later at 7;11. The system of The manual alphabet as it is used fingerspelling. today in the United States did not originate within the Deaf community but was adopted as an educational tool for Deaf children (Bender 1970) [See Conrad 1984]. There are many other possibilities for manual representational systems in addition to the one used in the United States. The manual alphabet used in Great Britain is a two-hand system, in contrast to the one-hand U.S. system. In Denmark there is a "mouth-hand" system based on a syllabic representation of spoken Danish; and there are systems for representing non-alphabetic symbols; e.g. hand represented and hand-on-hand drawn Chinese characters can be found in use by Chinese deaf persons. Fingerspelling is not a representation of spoken English, except through the latter's representation of written English. It does not encode phonological alternations in the language, e.g. vowel alternations; nor does it encode the various tiers that construct the spoken signal: tone, pitch, stress (word or phrase). Although fingerspelling has a one-to-one correspondence with each letter of the alphabet, it is not an identical representation of print, since the nature of the...