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5. SIGNING
- Gallaudet University Press
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===============5=============== SIGNING In signing, gestures and movements of the hands, known as signs, carry linguistic information much as words do in spoken language. This chapter considers some linguistic and psychological aspects of signing, with particular interest in those features which have relevance to the total communication approach to language development and to education. It deals with signing in its own right as language but also in association with spoken (or written) language. For simplicity , these are explained in relation to English unless specifically indicated. Signing will be described in three broad linguistic categories : sign language, as an independent language form; the blending of sign language and English, as Sign-English; and signed English systems for representing in manual form the syntax of English. SIGN LANGUAGE In sign language, manual gestures, together with bodily and facial cues, form signs which have meaning in themselves and are ordered according to their own syntactic rules. Sign language has been said to be the primary language used for communication among deaf people (Siple, 1978). Indeed, American Sign Language (also referred to as ASL or Sign) has been reported to be the fourth most common language in use in the United States (Mayberry , 1978). As there are many spoken languages, so there are many sign languages in use by deaf people in different countries. There are also regional and local variations in sign languages. Spoken language and sign language differ in the way in which they are produced and perceived. In spoken language , words are articulated through voice by one person Signing 57 / I ~ ~I~ I 10 Un (/1. /; . 1 /c,~merican . , ~ - ,~ Danish ~ Sign Language British Sign Language Sign Language Figure 10. Signs for MOTHER in three sign languages and normally received through hearing by another person. In sign language, signs are produced on the hands of the sender and received through vision by the receiver. Research into sign language and its use has been motivated largely by the questions, To what extent do spoken language and sign language have different properties which are dependent upon modality, and to what extent do they share properties which are independent of modality? With these questions in mind, some findings can be examined from research into the linguistic structure and psychological aspects of perception and acquisition of sign language. The linguistic study of sign language had its foundation in the pioneering work of Dr. William Stokoe at Gallaudet College in the late 1950s. Since that time, linguists and psychologists have taken an increasing interest in American Sign Language. In the 1970s, research also developed into signing and sign languages in use in other countries, including Israel (Namir and Schlesinger, 1978), Sweden (Bergman, 1979), Denmark (Hansen, 1980) and Great Britain (Brennan and Hayhurst, 1980). The study of American Sign Language has provided information on its linguistic structure at levels corresponding broadly to the phonological , lexical, and syntactic levels of spoken language. At the "phonological" level, signs are made up of parts which combine to give the meaning. This might be understood better by referring to the phonological elements of [54.145.183.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:30 GMT) 58 Total Communication speech sounds. With the advent in the 1950s of what was termed transformational or generative grammar, a "generative phonology" approach was evolved to describe language . An important aspect of this approach was the use of features, the breaking down of speech sounds into their various parts. Ingram (1976) clearly explained this: for example , [pI is a stop sound, is labial, and is unvoiced; whereas [v] is a fricative sound, is labiodental, and is voiced. Stokoe (1960) discovered that the manual components of signs can be divided into parts. He first suggested that each sign has three features, or aspects, from which it can be described. These features or aspects are the location in space where the sign is made in relation to the signer, the hand shape (or hand shapes) used, and the movement involved in making the sign. Stokoe used the terms tab, dez, and sig for these aspects of the production of signs. Figure 11. Two signs which are identical in location and movement, but differ in hand shape CHINESE Figure 12. Two signs which are identical in hand shape and movement, but differ in location Signing 59 Figure 13. Two signs which are identical in location and hand shape, but differ in movement Stokoe (1978) has identified a total of fifty-five such aspects -twelve of place, twenty-one of hand shape...