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A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF "DEAF ENGLISH" Veda R. Charrow The relationship between profound prelingual deafness and language processing ability is an area of interest to psycholinguistics, educational psychology, and cognitive psychology. Early studies by psycholinguists and educators of the deaf tended to show that the deaf were "language-deficient" or even "language-less" (Myklebust; Tervoort & Verbeck; Furth, 1966), since their English (or "native" language) competency was far below that of normal hearing persons, and since many deaf persons did not-and do not-have intelligible oral speech. Since the prelingually profoundly deaf person must be taught his societal language, over many years, researchers reasoned that the young deaf could serve as "languageless" controls in studies of the relation of language to cognitive development. This use of the deaf as languageless controls is a logical extension of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, that the structure of one's language influences one's perception of reality: If the deaf are indeed languageless, they should be unable to conceptualize, solve problems or even think clearly. However, investigations of the conceptual abilities of the deaf (VanderWoude; Furth, 1971; Furth, Youniss & Ross) have shown deaf subjects to be roughly equal to hearing subjects in tactical approaches to problems, and in their acquisition of logical structure. In short, these "languageless" deaf were found to be capable of propositional thought. Although the results of these studies are interesting, the premise upon which they were based is unsound. The assumption underlying these studies is that the deaf can serve to prove whether persons without language can think as language users think. The experimenters did not take into account the possibility that the deaf may not be languageless, and that the absence of auditory-vocal language (as well as the need to be taught one's societal language) does not necessarily exclude all possibility of language knowledge. Only recently have researchers in the area of language and deafness considered the possibility that the sign language(s) of the deaf is a true language, with a syntax and vocabulary of its own. Investigations by Stokoe, Bellugi, Fischer, Battison, Frishberg, Woodward and others, have established the fact that American Sign Language (ASL or Ameslan), the first language of the approximately ten percent of the deaf Sign Language Studies 7 who are children of deaf parents, is a complete and linguistically valid language. Furthermore, it is this author's contention that a deaf child of hearing parents, who does not have access to a standard sign language such as ASL, will, unless prevented or thwarted, develop an idiosyncratic gesture language of his own (cf. Hoemann). No deaf child is without a means of communication, although he may lack a knowledge of his societal spoken language or a standard sign language. The deaf child of hearing parents is languageless, only if one applies the strict definition of language, as a code sharedby a linguistic community. Nonetheless, because of the deaf child's inability to hear his societal language, and because of the differences in linguistic structure between any spoken language and any sign language (the different modalities adapt themselves to different kinds of grammatical structures-cf. Fischer, Woodward), the deaf child has great difficulty learning his societal language, even in non-oral form. Studies of the reading, writing and general educational performance of the deaf student (Goetzinger & Rousey; Miller; Boatner; McClure; Schulze; Dunagan) have shown the educational attainment of the deaf to be far below that of the hearing; most deaf students leave school as functional illiterates. Furthermore, the deaf were found to be retarded in their English language abilities, and made syntactical errors that the hearing do not make. The inability of the profoundly prelingually deaf to hear their societal language, and the consequent inability to learn it spontaneously, the long years of English study at school, and finally the poor performance of deaf students in English writing skills and writing ability, led this writer to the conclusion that English is not the deaf person's native language. In an experiment to test this hypothesis, Charrow & Fletcher (1974, in press) administered the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to two groups of deaf students-deaf children ofhearing parents and deaf...

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