1989 - Seeing Voices (12 page)

A terrible power, it would seem, lies with the mother: to communicate with her child properly or not; to introduce probing questions such as ‘How?’ ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ or replace them with a mindless monologue of ‘What’s this?’ ‘Do that’; to communicate a sense of logic and causality, or to leave everything at the dumb level of unaccountability; to introduce a vivid sense of place or time, or to refer only to the here and now; to introduce a ‘generalized reflection of reality,’ a conceptual world that will give coherence and meaning to life, and challenge the mind and emotions of the child, or to leave everything at the level of the ungeneralized, the unquestioned, at something almost below the animal level of the perceptual.
71

71. Eric Lenneberg feels that it is only in the
verbal
realm, after the age of three (say), that problems arise with the deaf; and in general, these are not severe in the preschool years (Lenneberg, 1967). Thus he writes:

A healthy deaf child two years or older gets along famously despite his total inability to communicate verbally. These children become very clever in their pantomime and have well-developed techniques for communicating their desires, needs, and even their opinions…The almost complete absence of language in these children is no hindrance to the most imaginative and intelligent play appropriate for the age. They love make-believe games; they can build fantastic structures with blocks or out of boxes; they may set up electric trains and develop the necessary logic for setting switches and anticipating the behavior of the moving train around curves and over bridges. They love to look at pictures, and no degree of stylizing renders the pictorial representation incomprehensible for them, and their own drawings leave nothing to be desired when compared with those produced by their hearing contemporaries. Thus, cognitive development as revealed through play seems to be no different from that which occurs in the presence of language development
.

Lenneberg’s view, which seemed reasonable in 1967, is not one that is now held by close observers of deaf children, all of whom feel that there may be major communicative and cognitive difficulties, even in preschool days, unless language is introduced as early as possible. Unless special measures are taken, the average deaf child will have only fifty to sixty words at the age of five or six, whereas the average hearing child has three thousand. Whatever the enchantments of toy trains and make-believe games, a child must be deprived of some aspects of childhood if he has, in effect, no language before going to school; there must be some communication with the parents, with other people, some understanding of the world in general, that is cut off. At least
one
would suspect
so
: we need careful studies, including perhaps analytic reconstructions, to see how the first five years of life are altered if one fails to acquire language during this period.

Children, it would seem, cannot choose the world they will live in—the mental and emotional, any more than the physical world; they are dependent, in the beginning, on what they are introduced to by their mothers.

It is not just language, but thought, that must be introduced. Otherwise the child will remain helplessly trapped in a concrete and perceptual world—the situation with Joseph, Kaspar, and Ildefonso. This peril is much greater if the child is deaf—because (hearing) parents may not know how to address their child and, if they communicate at all, may use rudimentary forms of dialogue and language that do not advance the child’s mind and that, indeed, prevent its advance.

Children seem to copy faithfully the cognitive world (and ‘style’) introduced to them by their mothers [Schlesinger writes]. Some mothers introduce a world that is populated by individual, static objects in the here-and-now labelled in identical ways for their children from toddlerhood through latency…Such mothers avoid language at a distance from the perceptual world…and in poignant attempts to share a world with their offspring join, and remain in, the perceptual world of their children…

[Other mothers, in contrast], introduce a world wherein things that are seen, touched and heard are enthusiastically processed through language. The world they introduce is wider, more complex, and more interesting to the toddlers. They too label objects in the perceptual world of their children, but use correct labels for more sophisticated percepts, and add attributes to them via adjectives…They include people, and label the actions and feelings of individuals in the world, and characterize them via adverbs. They not only
describe
the perceptual world but help their children
reorganize
it and to
reason
about its multiple possibilities.
72

72. Schlesinger, Hilde. ‘Buds of Development: Antecedents of Academic Achievement,’ work in progress.

These mothers, then, encourage the formation of a conceptual world which, far from impoverishing, enhances the perceptual world, enriching it and elevating it continually to the level of symbol and meaning. Poor dialogue, communicative defeat, so Schlesinger feels, leads not only to intellectual constriction but to timidity and passivity; creative dialogue, a rich communicative interchange in childhood, awakens the imagination and mind, leads to a self-sufficiency, a boldness, a playfulness, a humor, that will be with the person for the rest of his life.
73

73. It does not matter
essentially
, Schlesinger believes, whether the dialogue between mother and child is in speech or Sign; what matters is its communicative intent. This intent—which, like so many intents, is largely unconscious, may be in the direction of trying to
control
the child, or in the healthy direction of fostering its growth, its autonomy, and its expansion of mind. But the use of Sign, other things being equal, clearly makes communication easier in very early life, because the deaf infant spontaneously picks up Sign, but cannot as readily pick up speech.

Schlesinger sees communicative intent as a function of ‘power’—whether the parents feel ‘powerful’ or ‘powerless’ in relation to their child. Powerful parents, in her formulation, feeling themselves autonomous and powerful, give autonomy and power to their children; powerless ones, feeling themselves passive and controlled, in turn exert an excessive control on their children, and monologue
at
them, instead of having a dialogue
with
them. Having a deaf child, of course, may give the parents a feeling of powerlessness: How can they communicate with the child? What can they do? What expectations can they, or the child, have for the future? What sort of world will be forced on them, or will they force on the child? What seems crucial is that there be a feeling, not of force, but of choice—that there be a desire for effective communication, whether it be speech, Sign, or both.

Charlotte, a little girl of six, is also, like Joseph, congenitally deaf. But Charlotte is tremendously animated, playful, full of curiosity, turned vividly to the world. She is almost indistinguishable from any other six-year-old—totally different from poor, cut-off Joseph. What made the difference? As soon as Charlotte’s parents realized she was deaf—when she was a few months old—they decided to learn a signed language, knowing that she would not be able to pick up spoken language easily. They did this, as did several of their relatives and friends. As Charlotte’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth, wrote when Charlotte was four:

Our daughter Charlotte was diagnosed profoundly deaf at ten months old. During these past three years we have experienced a range of emotions: disbelief, panic and anxiety, rage, depression and grief, and finally acceptance and appreciation. As our initial panic wore off it became clear that we needed to use sign language with our daughter while she was young.
74

74. ‘For someone as deaf as Charlotte, lip-reading and intelligible speech can be achieved only after years of hard work, if at all,’ writes Sarah Elizabeth. This, at least, was her conclusion, after much study and discussion. But the parents of another profoundly deaf little girl, confronted with much the same situation, came to another conclusion, and felt they had another option.

Alice was found to be profoundly deaf at the age of seventeen months (with a hearing loss of 120 db in one ear and 108 db in the other). One answer for her, her parents were persuaded, lay in Cued Speech, coupled with the use of the most powerful hearing aids. (Cued Speech, developed by Orin Cornett, makes use of simple hand positions about the mouth, which serve to clarify different sounds that look alike to the lip reader.) Alice has apparently done well with this, has acquired a large vocabulary and excellent grammar, and (at the age of five) has an expressive language level twenty months in advance of her age. She reads and writes well,
enjoys
reading and writing. She does well academically (she has a full-time Cued Speech interpreter at school). She is described by her parents as ‘very bright, well-adjusted, popular, outgoing,’ though with some fears, now, about finding herself ‘cut-off’ in school.

But though her language abilities are so good, her ability to communicate has marked limitations. Her speech is still difficult to understand, has a ‘chopped-up quality,’ and leaves out many of the sounds of spontaneous speech. She can be understood well by her parents and teachers, but much less well by anyone else. She can clarify her meaning with expressive Cuing, but the number of people who understand Cue is minimal. She is also somewhat below normal in her ability to pick up speech: lip-reading is not just a visual skill—75 percent of it is a sort of inspired guessing or hypothesizing, dependent on the use of contextual clues. It is easier for the postlingually deaf, who know speech, to ‘read’ it; much more difficult for the prelingually deaf, like Alice. Thus, although she is in the hearing world, she faces great difficulties—and potential isolation—in it too. Life at home, before the age of five, with understanding parents, may not place too many demands upon a deaf child, but life thereafter is very different. The problems of a child with grossly defective speech and hearing are liable to increase dramatically with each year at school.

Alice’s parents are open-minded, and did not force her exclusively toward Cuing; indeed, they were astonished that it worked. But they have clear preferences as to the world they would like their daughter to inhabit: ‘I want her to go either way,’ says her father, ‘but in my mind’s eye I prefer to think of her in the hearing world, marrying a hearing person, etc. But she’d gain a tremendous amount of strength from another deaf person…She loves signing too, she needs a relationship with another signer. I hope she can feel at home in
both
deaf and hearing worlds.’ One must hope that Alice can learn Sign, and now—because very soon it will be too late for her to acquire it with native competence. And if she does not acquire it, she may not find herself at home in
either
world.

We started a sign language class at our home studying Signed Exact English, SEE, an exact replication of spoken English in signs, which we felt would help us in passing on our English language, literature, and culture to our child. As hearing parents we were overwhelmed by the task of learning a new language ourselves and having to teach it to Charlotte simultaneously, so the familiarity of English syntax made sign language seem accessible to us…We desperately wanted to believe that Charlotte was similar to us.

After a year we decided to move away from the rigidity of SEE to pidgin Signed English, a mixture of American Sign Language vocabulary, which is more visually descriptive, and English syntax, which is familiar…[but] the elaborate linear structures of spoken English don’t translate into interesting sign language, so we had to reorient the way we thought to produce visual sentences. We were introduced to the most lively and exciting aspects of signing: idioms, humor, mime, whole-concept signs, and facial expression…Now we are moving to American Sign Language, studying it with a deaf woman, a native signer who can communicate in signs without hesitation and can codify the language for us hearing people. We are excited and stimulated by the process of learning an ingenious and sensible language which has such beauty and imagination. It is a delight to realize that Charlotte’s signing reflects visual thought patterns. We are startled into thinking differently about physical objects, and their placement and motion, because of Charlotte’s expressions.

I found this narrative powerful and fascinating, indicating how Charlotte’s parents first wanted to believe their daughter essentially similar to themselves, despite the fact that she uses her eyes, not her ears; how they first used SEE, which has no real structure of its own, but is a mere transliteration of an auditory language, and how they only gradually came to appreciate the fundamental visuality of their child, her use of ‘visual thought patterns,’ and how this both needed and generated a visual language. Rather than imposing their auditory world on their child, as so many parents of the deaf do, they encouraged her to advance into her own (visual) world, which they were then able to share with her. By the age of four, indeed, Charlotte had advanced so far into visual thinking and language that she was able to provide new ways of thinking—revelations—to her parents.

Early in 1987, Charlotte and her family moved from California to Albany, New York, and her mother wrote again to me:

Charlotte is now a six-year-old first-grader. We, of course, feel she is a remarkable person because, although profoundly deaf, she is interested, thoughtful, competent within her (mainly) hearing world. She seems comfortable in both ASL and English, communicates enthusiastically with deaf adults and children and reads and writes at a third-grade level. Her hearing brother, Nathaniel, is fluent and easy in Sign; our family conducts many conversations and much business in sign language…I feel our experience bears out the idea that early exposure to visually coherent language develops complex conceptual thought processes. Charlotte knows how to think and how to reason. She uses effectively the linguistic tools she has been given to build complicated ideas.