Evidence From Exceptions: Sign Language & Bioprograms

EVIDENCE FROM EXCEPTIONS: SIGN LANGUAGE & BIOPROGRAMS REVIEW ARTICLE Peter Bakker, Autonomous Languages. 1987. Publications of the Institute for General Linguistics, No. 53. University of Amsterdam (Spuisstraat 210) 012VT Amsterdam. xx &97pp. 21 x 29.5cm. Paper. $8.75. William C. Stokoe A groundbreaking book Peter Bakker's book is one of those that prompts asking, Why didn't someone do this before? To test the hypothesis that language comes from an innate human "bioprogram," he has investigated all available accounts of autonomous languages. His definition of his subject: An autonomous language is a language created by one or more children as their first language, used to communicate with siblings or some other family members, but unintelligible to outsiders. (p.4) The definition allows him to include examples (in sources from 1896 to 1977) of speech languages created by children in what appear to be ordinary circumstances, and by hearing children in deaf families. He also examines sign languages created by deaf children in hearing, nonsigning families. In all examples the language of the child differs, to the point of unintelligibility, from that of the adults in the family; thus it might be explained by the currently fashionable theory that a bioprogram uniquely equips humans for language. The difference between an autonomous language and what might be called the child's target language, the one adults around it use, is so great in each case that some linguists tend to think that the language the child creates cannot have come from that target. Linguistic theory has therefore presupposed some device, biologically innate in every human brain, that allows a child to understand and to produce language. Bakker chooses the particular language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) elaborated by Derek Bickerton to test the theory of language innateness, because, as he points out (p. 73), Bickerton presents it in the proper form for a scientific theory. If what the LBH predicts occurs, it @1989 by Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 339 may or may not be true, but if what it predicts does not occur, then the hypothesis proves false and a new hypothesis is needed. One of the most intriguing questions about sign languages and their relation to language is whether the circumstances of their acquisition can shed light on a central debate in linguistics. About 90% of children born deaf see no sign language at home, yet they too, the theory says, are born with an innate "language acquisition device." This device, a Universal Grammar "hard-wired" into the brain, is thought to enable every human being, not only to generate all possible language structures, but also to decide, on the basis of highly variable and inconsistent input, which of all possible grammars is the grammar of the target language in the environment. When a child cannot hear, others' speech certainly amounts to variable and inconsistent information-if the target is accessible at all. Right here, however, it is important to look at the difference between observed reality and theoretical debates about language and communication. A deaf child in a hearing family cannot hear the language spoken to it, but that does not mean that there is no communication.Facial expression, the body's stance and movements, and all the other features of face-to-face interaction except the sounds of speech are part of the communicative "input" to the child. Children with "zero language input" Bakker devotes a relatively large portion of his analysis to autonomous sign languages (4.2.3.2. "Goldin-Meadow & Co."). Some readers will recall the early report by Goldin-Meadow and Feldman published in Sign Language Studies 8 (1975): 225-234. They studied the gesturing of four deaf children whose parents had decided in favor of oral education and had, as oral educators demand, decided to use no signs with them. The report in SLS 8 is entitled "The creation of a communication system: A study of deaf children of hearing parents." The authors state that at first the deaf child "uses very few different gestures in the same contexts in which we find the hearing child's early single words" (op. cit. 227). The gestures, largely pointings, like the words of...