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Summer 1985 COMMENT William Stokoe The Editor cordially thanks the Guest Editor and Authors in this issue for this excellent evidence of the effect ethnography can have on the study of sign language and its promise for education of deaf children. He would like to add two comments, to "spread on the record," as it were, some of the discussion of the second paper that time did not allow at the Forum last spring. The decoding of First, although the conclusion simultaneous com- that simultaneous communication munication. is a bimodal expression of an English base cannot be refuted, a question still needs to be raised: When there is not unimpaired reception of speech, how accessible is the English message that can be seen only in signs and mouthing? Although it be stipulated that the complete message is always present (for the listener) and that the manual signs constitute a "telegraphic" and not greatly mismatched copy of the message, we must still ask: How much of the message -- form AND meaning -- is the deaf child receiving or capable of receiving? To what extent can one unable to hear speech receive and understand the message? And perhaps more important (for it is often argued that SC facilitates the acquisition of English language skills), to what extent is the deaf participant in SC conversations able to match unerringly the meaning to the English form? This is an educational question ripe for empirical investigation, but a broad program of testing already provides one answer.1 It appears that even if deaf high school students generally can converse as well in SC as do the two adolescents reported on, their reading of English (English structures presented in a visual code for a vocal modality) does not demonstrate possession of the same level of communicative competence. The question remains. Even though the base of SC is 1 The Annual Survey of Hearing Impaired Children and Youth, Center for Demographic and Assessment Studies, Gallaudet Research Institute, Washington, DC 20002. 1985 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 47 Comment : 182 English and not ASL -- nor a mixture of ASL and English; how much of the structure of English can be acquired by deaf children addressed only by persons using SC? How much language and what language do they acquire? As good research does, the study by Bernstein, Maxwell, and Matthews raises more questions than it answers while it suggests new ways of asking them. Sign diglossia? My second comment refers to diglossia, or more precisely, to my 1969 suggestion that such a sociolinguistic interrelationship seemed to be found in the signing community. As the first to apply Charles Ferguson's term "diglossia" (1959) in the context of signing, I would like to take this opportunity to comment at some length on what has been discovered about the sociolinguistics of sign language in the years since my suggestion was published. One way to begin now, if the whole diglossia question could be begun anew, would be to recognize the three linguistic communities: the 100% American linguistic community (imaginary of course), in which everyone speaks and hears English perfectly; the small (by comparison) Deaf community in which everyone signs and understands ASL; and the special educational community made up almost entirely, as Erting's study suggests, of deaf children and hearing adults. Ferguson's terms "H" and "L", of course, stand for much more than high and low prestige; they have their full meaning only in the context of a single linguistic community -- the kind of community Ferguson so meticulously describes. I know from personal experience that a great many hearing teachers and educators in the special community consider speaking to have high prestige and signing such low prestige that they usually forbid its use or almost totally ignore it; but just as truly, members of the Deaf community, accord high prestige to signing ASL; signing in English order (especially when it is sprinkled with newly invented signs) they are likely to think of as cause for excluding its signer from the group. I agree with Bernstein et al. that injecting into the discussion of diglossia another sociolinguistic idea, that of pidgin languages, does...

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