What Language Do Deaf Children Acquire?: A Review Article

WHAT LANGUAGE DO DEAF CHILDREN ACQUIRE? A REVIEW ARTICLE Hany Markowicz In a recent paper, "Sign Language Acquisition and the Teaching of Deaf Children", Cicourel and Boese (1972) deal with two important topics, sign language, and its use in teaching. It is noteworthy that Cazden, John, and Hymes (1972) include this paper in Functionsof Language in the Classroom. Contributors to this volume look at language use in the classroom from the viewpoints of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. This multidimensional perspective on minority-group education should help educators to understand better the situation of childre n who do not use the standard language when they come to school. Dealing with children born profoundly deaf presents even greater difficulties for the teacher, since there are formidable barriers to their acquisition of both oral and written varieties of standard English. Cicourel and Boese present arguments that a place should be made for sign language in the schooling of the deaf. Their paper's simultaneous publication in the American Annals of the Deaf (117, 27-33, 403-411) makes readily available to teachers of the deaf their plea for utilization of sign language competence in the classroom. While approving the general arguments for use of native language competence, one may be perplexed by the description Cicourel and Boese give of sign language. As a result the impact of their argument is weakened. Possibly the co-authorship of this paper was not as successful as would have been the case had the two authors understood each other better. In addition, in the introduction they state that they will deal with the situation of deaf and hearing children of deaf parents as well as of deaf children of hearing parents, but in fact they refer generally only to deaf Markowicz children of deaf parents throughout the paper. The implications for deaf children of hearing parents are not pursued. With Cicourel's model of language as basis, the acquisition of sign language is treated as the spontaneous activity of the deaf child observing deaf parents' communication in signs. The authors fail to point out that this is not the case for about 90% of deaf children, who are born to parents knowing no sign language and most probably unaware that it is a viable language used by a large majority of deaf adults. Thus, while deaf children of deaf parents who do communicate by signs have achieved competence in one language by the time they start school, deaf children born to hearing parents are virtually without language at a stage when other cildren have an almost complete mastery of the language of their community. The hearing children of signing deaf parents become fluent, given opportunity of exposure to speakers, in oral language as well as in sign language-exactly like children raised in a bilingual oral environment. The discussion of sign language by Cicourel and Boese gives the impression that what they call "the native sign language" is acquired spontaneously by all deaf children as it is by the 10%of deaf children and by hearing children of deaf parents as well. It is possible as a result of the discussion to imagine that native sign language is an ad hoc system of esoteric gestures developed within a particular family for communication with a deaf individual. While the authors point out that sign language is the only language in.which the deaf can qualify as natives, and to ignore the language is to cut off the deaf from their native culture, they foster the wrongly imagined view of a sign language by stating that sign language lacks standardized syntax. Furthermore, they claim that "American sign language", which they define as a form of English in which words are represented by signs or are fingerspelled, is more formal, more general, and capable of greater abstraction than sign language-reinforcing the view that sign language is grammarless ad hoc communication. Whether the two authors intended to convey that view is not easily determined from their paper. Oral language must always remain a foreign language to the prelingually deaf; Cicourel and Boese point out that even for the few deaf Sign Language Studies individuals who acquire good speech, oral...