Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

The Interplay Between Visuospatial Language and Visuospatial Script

The Interplay Between Visuospatial Language and Visuospatial Script Angela Fok Karen van Hoek Edward S. Klima Ursula Bellugi T he diversity of writing systems across languages provides excellent opportunities for investigators of human cognition to examine how children, hearing or deaf, adjust to meet various task demands imposed by different orthographies. Among the writing systems existing in the world today, Chinese characters are perhaps the most radically different from the English alphabetic system. In this paper we report on a study of deaf and hearing children in the beginning stages of learning to write in two very different languages: English and Chinese. We may glean clues to the effects of the orthographic organization on the learning process by examining the approaches taken by four different groups of children: hearing children who are acquiring spoken English or Chinese as a first language, and deaf children who are acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) or Chinese Sign Language (CSL) as a native language. We also examine the interplay between visual language, visuospatial processing, and processing of script. This study is one of a series in which we have examined the effects of different This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grants DC00146, DC00201, P50-NS 22343, HD 13249, and by National Science Foundation Grant BNS8820673 to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. We would like to thank the faculty and staff as well as the students and their families at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, the Canossa School for the Deaf in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong School for the Deaf for their participation in these studies. Illustrations copyright Ursula Bellugi, The Salk Institute. 127 128 Language and Cognition native-language modalities-spoken and signed-and different orthographic systems in deaf and hearing children (Bellugi 1988; Fok & Bellugi 1986; Fok, Bellugi, et al. 1988). The deaf children in our studies have little or no access to the phonological forms of the spoken language, while they do have native competency in signed languages whose surface patterning, having developed in the visuospatial mode, is very different from that of spoken languages. How does a deaf child approach the task of learning a written representation of a spoken language he or she has never heard? We investigate the young deaf child's beginning approach to writing with respect to different scripts, examining the interplay between primary language modality (auditory or visuospatial) and orthographic structure (alphabetic or logographic). ALPHABETIC AND LOGOGRAPHIC ORTHOGRAPHIES English and Chinese were selected as the target written languages because they represent two very different types of orthographic systems. The English writing system is largely based on the principle of letter-for-sound correspondence. Letters representing phonemes are arranged in a linear order that indicates the temporal sequencing of the phonemes. The Chinese system, in contrast, is opaque with respect to the speech/script relationship, and is emphatically spatial in the layout of every logographic symbol. Each character or logograph represents one morpheme , rather than a phoneme. Characters are internally composed of units arranged according to a spatial architecture (Tzeng & Wang 1984; Tzeng in press). The internal components of characters may be placed side by side, one above the other, in quadrants, or in one of a number of other configurations. Learning to write Chinese therefore depends on learning complex spatial relationships and arrays entirely unlike anything confronting the child learning English . These two very different orthographies can be expected to present different problems for learners, and in particular, may present very different tasks to those learners who do not know the spoken languages-deaf children whose native languages are signed languages. AMERICAN AND CHINESE SIGNED LANGUAGES A large number of studies have demonstrated that American Sign Language is a full-fledged language, completely separate and independent from English, with its own grammatical mechanisms (Klima & Bellugi 1979; Bellugi, Poizner & Klima 1989). The grammar of ASL is essentially spatialized, making pervasive use of spatial contrasts for signaling morphological and syntactic information. Our studies of Chinese Sign Language (CSL) show that it too is an independent language, not derived from spoken or written Chinese (although there are occasional borrowings from written characters). As Figure 1 shows, CSL has its own principles of word formation, of morphology, and of syntax, which are similar to principles of ASL in their use of space, but which differ in language- The Interplay Between Visuospatial Language and Visuospatial Script 129 INTRODUCE meaning "confiscate...