1989 - Seeing Voices (8 page)

For Joseph, the beginnings of a communication, a language, had now started, and he was tremendously excited at this. The school had found that it was not just formal instruction that he needed, but playing with language, language games, as with a toddler learning language for the first time. In this, it was hoped, he might begin to acquire language and conceptual thinking, to acquire it in the
act
of intellectual play. I found myself thinking of the twins Luria described, who had been in a sense so ‘retarded’ because their language was so bad, and how they improved, immeasurably, when they acquired it.
48

48. A.R. Luria and F. la. Yudovich describe identical twins with a congenital language retardation (due to cerebral problems, not to deafness). These twins, although of normal intelligence, and even bright, functioned in a very primitive way—their play was repetitive and uncreative. They had extreme difficulty thinking out problems, conceiving complex actions or plans; there was, in Luria’s words, ‘a peculiar, insufficiently differentiated, structure of consciousness, [with inability] to detach word from action, to master orienting, to plan activity…to formulate the aims of activity with the aid of speech.’

When the twins were separated, and each acquired a normal language system, ‘the whole structure of the mental life of both twins was simultaneously and sharply changed…and after only three months we observed the beginnings of meaningful play…the possibility of productive, constructive activity in the light of formulated aims…intellectual operations which shortly before this were only in an embryonic state…‘

All of these ‘cardinal improvements’ (as Luria puts it), improvements not only in intellectual functioning but in the entire being of the children, ‘we could only attribute to the influence of the one changed factor—the acquisition of a language system.’

Luria and Yudovich also comment about the disabilities of the languageless deaf:

The deaf mute who has not been taught to speak…does not possess all those forms of reflection which are realized through speech…[He] indicates objects or actions with a gesture; he is unable to form abstract concepts, to systematize the phenomena of the external world with the aid of abstracted signals furnished by language but which are not natural to visual, practically acquired experience
.

(See Luria and Yudovich, 1958, especially pp. 120-123.)

One must regret that Luria, apparently, had no experience with deaf people who had acquired fluent language, for he would have provided us with incomparable descriptions of the acquisition of conceptual and systematizing power
with
language.

Addendum (1990
): I have recently learned that, although he never published on the subject, Luria
did
have a great deal to do during the 1950’s, with deaf (and deaf-blind) children, and the role of sign language in their education and development. This represented, in away, a return to the ‘defectology’ which he and Vygotsky had pioneered in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and which he was later to explore in his rehabilitative approaches to the neurologically injured (see footnote 55, pp. 50-51).

Would this too be possible for Joseph?

The very word ‘infant’ means nonspeaking, and there is much to suggest that the acquisition of language marks an absolute and qualitative development in human nature. Though a well-developed, active, bright eleven-year-old, Joseph was in this sense still an infant—denied the power, the world, that language opens up. In Joseph Church’s words:
49

49. Church, 1961, pp. 94-95.

Language opens up new orientations and new possibilities for learning and for action, dominating and transforming preverbal experiences…Language is not just one function among many…but an all-pervasive characteristic of the individual such that he becomes a
verbal organism
(all of whose experiences and actions and conceptions are now altered in accordance with a verbalized or symbolic experience).

Language transforms experience…Through language…one can induct the child into a purely symbolic realm of past and future, of remote places, of ideal relationships, of hypothetical events, of imaginative literature, of imaginary entities ranging from werewolves to pi-mesons…

At the same time the learning of language transforms the individual in such a way that he is enabled to do new things for himself, or to do old things in new ways. Language permits us to deal with things at a distance, to act on them without physically handling them. First, we can act on other people, or on objects through people…Second, we can manipulate symbols in ways impossible with the things they stand for, and so arrive at novel and even creative versions of reality…We can verbally rearrange situations which in themselves would resist rearrangement…we can isolate features which in fact cannot be isolated…we can juxtapose objects and events far separated in time and space…we can, if we will, turn the universe symbolically inside out.

We
can do this, but Joseph could not. Joseph could not reach that symbolic plane which is the normal human birth-right from earliest childhood on. He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no infant could have.
50

50.
Note
1990: Recently, while in Italy, I encountered a nine-year-old gypsy boy, Manuel, who had been born deaf, but had never met other deaf people, and (with his roving gypsy life) had never received any education. He was quite languageless, with neither Sign nor Italian, but bright, affectionate, and emotionally normal—he was much loved by his parents and older siblings, and entrusted by them with all sorts of tasks. When he entered the via Nomentana school for the deaf, there was doubt as to whether he would acquire language fluently at his age. But he has done brilliantly, and in three months has already acquired fair Sign and fair Italian, loves both languages, loves communicating, and is full of questions and curiosity and intellectual vitality. He has done much better than poor Joseph, whose acquisition of language has been slow and laborious.

Why the difference? Manuel is clearly a very bright child indeed, and Joseph one of ordinary (though not subnormal) intelligence; but, perhaps more to the point, Manuel was always loved, always involved, always
treated as normal
—he was completely a part of his family and community, who saw him as different but never as alien—whereas Joseph was regarded, and often treated, as autistic or retarded. Manuel was never left out, never
felt
left out; he did not suffer, as Joseph did, from an annihilating sense of left-outness and isolation.

This emotional factor is probably of great importance in determining whether or not language acquisition will be successful near or after the ‘critical age.’ Thus Ildefonso (p. 55), was successful, but three other languageless deaf adults whom Susan Schaller encountered had been so damaged emotionally by isolation (and in one case institutionalization as well) that they had become withdrawn and inaccessible,
had turned against communication
, and were no longer open to any attempts to establish formal language.

I began to wonder about other deaf people who had reached adolescence, adulthood perhaps, without language of any kind. They had existed, in considerable numbers, in the eighteenth century: Jean Massieu was one of the most famous of these. Languageless until the age of almost fourteen, Massieu then became a pupil of the Abbe Sicard and achieved a spectacular success, becoming eloquent both in Sign and written French. Massieu himself wrote a short autobiography, while Sicard wrote an entire book about him, of how it was possible to ‘ ‘liberate’ the languageless into a new form of being.
51
Massieu described his growing up on a farm with eight brothers and sisters, five of whom were, like himself, born deaf:

51. Massieu’s autobiography is reprinted in Lane,
1984b
, pp. 76-80, and Sicard’s book is also excerpted here, pp. 83-126.

Until the age of thirteen and nine months I remained at home without ever receiving any education. I was totally unlettered. I expressed my ideas by manual signs and gestures…the signs I used to express my ideas to my family were quite different from the signs of educated deaf-mutes. Strangers did not understand us when we expressed our ideas with signs, but the neighbors did…Children my own age would not play with me, they looked down on me, I was like a dog. I passed the time alone playing with a top or a mallet and ball, or walking on stilts.

It is not entirely clear what Massieu’s mind was like, given the absence of a genuine language (though it is clear that he had plenty of communication of a primitive sort, using the ‘home signs’ that he and his deaf siblings had devised, which constituted a complex, but almost grammarless, gestural system).
52

52. In 1977 S. Goldin-Meadow and H. Feldman began videotaping a group of profoundly deaf preschool children who were isolated from other signers, because their parents preferred them to learn speech and lip-reading (Goldin-Meadow and Feldman, 1977). Despite this isolation, and their parents’ strong encouragement to use speech, the children began to create gestures—first single gestures, then strings of gestures—to represent people, objects, and actions. This is what happened with Massieu and others in the eighteenth century. The ‘home signs’ that Massieu developed, and that these isolated preschool children developed, are simple gestural systems that may have a rudimentary syntax and morphology of a very limited sort; but they do not make the transition, the leap into a full grammar and syntax, such as occurs when a child is exposed to Sign.

Similar observations have been made of isolated deaf adults—there was one such deaf man in the Solomon Islands, the first in twenty-four generations (Kuschel, 1973); they too will invent gestural systems, with a very simple syntax and morphology, by which they can communicate basic needs and feelings to their neighbors—but cannot
by themselves
make the qualitative leap from such a gestural system into a complete, fully grammaticized linguistic system.

We see here, as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries point out, poignant attempts to invent a language within one lifetime. And, essentially, this cannot be done, because it requires a child, and a child’s brain, exposed to a natural language, to create and transmit, to evolve, a natural language. Thus sign languages are
historical
creations that require, at the very least, two generations for their genesis. Sign may become still richer, evolve, with several generations, as was the case on Martha’s Vineyard, but two generations are
enough
.

We see the same situation with speech. Thus when linguistically different communities meet and have to communicate, they develop an improvised, grammarless pidgin. Grammar only appears in the next generation, when the children bring it to their parents’ pidgin, creating a rich and fully grammaticized creole. This at least is the thesis of the linguist Derek Bickerton (see Restak, 1988, pp. 216-217). Thus, a deaf Adam and Eve would improvise signs but lack language; a true, grammatical sign language would evolve only with the development of their children, Cain and Abel.

It seems clear that grammatical potential is present, even explosively present, in every child’s brain, and that it will leap out and actualize itself given the least opportunity. This is particularly clear in the case of deaf children who have been isolated, but who are finally, serendipitously, exposed to Sign. In this instance, even the briefest exposure to a fully grammaticized sign language can serve to initiate a huge and rapidly spreading change. A glimpse of a subject⁄object usage, or a sentence construction, may ignite the latent grammatical power of the brain and produce a sudden fulguration, and a very rapid conversion from a gestural system to a true language. Grammar can spread, among such children, like a contagion. It must take a very exceptional degree of isolation, indeed, to prevent this happening.

He tells us:

I saw cattle, horses, donkeys, pigs, dogs, cats, vegetables, houses, fields, grapevines, and after seeing all these things remembered them well.

He also had a sense of numbers, even though he lacked names for these:

Before my education I did not know how to count; my fingers had taught me. I did not know numbers; I counted on my fingers, and when the count went beyond ten I made notches on a stick. ’

And he tells us, very poignantly, how he envied other children going to school; how he took up books, but could make nothing of them; and how he tried to copy the letters of the alphabet with a quill, knowing that they must have some strange power, but unable to give any meaning to them.

Sicard’s description of Massieu’s education is fascinating. He found (as I had observed with Joseph) that the boy had a good eye; and he started by drawing pictures of objects and asking Massieu to do the same. Then, to introduce Massieu to language, Sicard wrote the names of the objects on their pictures. At first, his pupil “was utterly mystified. He had no idea how lines that did not appear to picture anything could function as an image for objects and represent them with such accuracy and speed.” Then, very suddenly, Massieu
got
it, got the idea of an abstract and symbolic representation: “at that moment [he] learned the whole advantage and difficulty of writing…[and] from that moment on, the drawing was banished, we replaced it with writing.”

Now Massieu perceived that an object, or an image, might be represented by a name he developed a tremendous, violent hunger for names. Sicard gives marvelous descriptions of how the two of them took walks together, with Massieu demanding and noting the names for everything: