Deaf Culture

Deafness and deafness

Among the people living in the cities and towns of East Texas, 31,000 are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Within this population are many who are drawn together by common experiences associated with hearing loss and deafness: specialized education, telecommunication devices, hearing aids, audiologists, use of interpreters.... But beyond the circumstances of daily life, many share a deeper union bound by a shared visual orientation with the world, common history and traditions which are conceptualized and expressed through a common language, the language of the American Deaf - American Sign Language. In my talk I will introduce issues relevant to Deaf culture; things which people who hear should know about those who don't.

If a tree falls in the forest, and the only person to watch it fall is deaf, does the tree make a sound?

Before the industrial revolution, when people settled into a particular region to farm and raise sheep or cattle, distant travel was rare. Communities were small and everyone knew everyone else. In such communities the gene pool was rather limited as marriages were conducted between members of only a few families or clans. In the settling of Martha’s Vinyard, an island south of the Massachusetts coast line, immigrants from the region of Kent, England drifted down from New England to the island during the early 17^th century. The group - a localized population - carried a recessive gene for deafness, a deafness accompanied by no other physical abnormality (85% of the deaf were born of two hearing parents). The large percentage of deaf citizens inspired the whole community of about 300 to converse in sign language whether deaf or not. (The gene pool remained small into the mid-19th century, when the whaling boom and its seamen brought genetic diversity to the island). This unique history has been researched and documented in Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Hear Spoke Sign Language:

page 61:

Well, there was a man by the name of Joseph Walenski, who was a famous artist. I don’t like his artwork, but he was... And he came into the store one night, the post office was open as long as the store was, to buy a stamp and mail a letter. That was the meeting place for everybody in town, the deaf and dumb as well as those who weren’t and, of course, everybody used the sign language, and they’d be making the signs in sign language. There would be a complete silence in there, and even those who could talk would often be silent.

And Joseph Walenski walked in there one night, there was this assemblage of great big men, they were big, and there was complete silence, and the place was only lighted by the kerosene lamps, you know. And there were these tremendously big men-dim in the store, dim light-standing around, perfectly silent, looking at him. And he thought [they looked] aggressive. But of course they weren’t, they were just, you know, making signs among themselves. He was scared to death.

Page 63:

My son came home with a friend... from off-island, who was studying for the ministry. The news got around that my son had brought home a minister, so he was... invited to speak in church that Sunday. And he said he would. Well, Mr. B. was deaf and dumb and he and his family always sat in one of the front pews. She’d always preach the whole sermon to him in deaf and dumb sign. So this ministry student, he preached and when he come back home, I asked him how he thought it went. "All right" he said, "except there was one lady in the front pew who was awfully nervous, couldn’t keep her hands still."

I want to start with a story about two young boys (brothers) who were talking with each other about how strange the next-door neighbors seemed to be. The little girl who lived there would come over to play some days, but the brothers realized that she couldn’t easily communicate. They would have to take her by the hand and show her what they wanted to do or play with. And when they went over to her house, even her parents seemed dull and unresponsive when they tried to politely chat. The brothers finally asked their mother why the neighbors were so weird, what was wrong with them? She explained that the neighbors were not Deaf, and did not know how to sign. The brothers, Sam and Ted Supalla, felt sorry for them. Sam asked his mother if this girl and her family were the only ones like that. His mother explained that no, nearly every one else was like the neighbors. It was his own family that was unusual - deaf parents with several deaf sons, all living in a warm, comfortable and richly informed home environment.

But in America today, only about 10% of deaf children are born to deaf parents. For the other 90% family life is complicated by the parents’ and siblings inability to communicate with the new child. Many unexpected problems arise in the family: building intimacy, providing guidance and education, sharing incidental information - overheard jokes, gossip, family stories and legends, singing, all communicated with the subtleties of spoken language.

The deaf child born into a Deaf family like the Suppalas develops a self identity as part of a unified group of similar individuals who interact in effective and predictable ways. But the deaf child born into a hearing family develops a self identity as an alien, isolated and excluded from communication. The Deaf family experiences a cultural connection related to their deafness. The deaf child in a hearing family experiences deafness as a physical malady, an impairment, a personal deficiency.

Here I can present the terms "deaf" and "Deaf" to represent two related yet distinctly different meanings - "deaf" or "deafness" is a medical term for a physical and audiological inability to hear functionally in daily experience. "Deaf"as explained by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries in Deaf in America, refers to the community of people who share not only this physical medical, characteristic of "deafness", but also share a common language-American Sign Language, inherited through several generations of users. They participate in a shared culture composed of a unique body of literature and folklore, common customs and "a unifying set of beliefs about themselves and their connection to the larger society" (Padden and Humphries 2).

In hearing culture the politically correct term is "hearing impaired," but to a deaf person this implies that they are defective. If a person has never had hearing, then they don’t miss it. Suppose creatures from another realm arrive with some perceptive sense that we don’t experience. Are we now defective or incomplete because we don’t possess that unknown function?

On CODAS:

Hearing children born to deaf parents, known in the interpreting field as CODAS (Children of Deaf Adults) experience another variation on the Deaf family. Describing her life as a CODA, Lou Ann Walker, a professional journalist, provides that unique perspective in her book, A Loss for Words:

"As my parents’ child I was part of the deaf world with its culture, even though I could hear and was thus wired to normal society. My parents’ friends felt I was ‘one of them,’ and years later, when deaf people asked me how I learned sign language, I could see them relax, I could see the relief on their faces, when I told them my parents were deaf." (55)

In the book she recounts life-long memories of growing up in a Deaf household. After high school, Lou Ann left home in the mid-west for Harvard and on to New York to pursue her writing career (worked for New York, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Diversion, Direct - written for The New York Times, Esquire, American Health and People). Her first documentation about the Deaf world was an article for People magazine on a deaf street gang in the South Bronx called the Nasty Homicides (People Weekly, June 12, 1982).

Re: gangs - Maybe you read early this summer about the Deaf boy and cousin in Fort Worth - shot by gang mistaking sign language for gang signs.

One of the few studies of young CODAS revealed that, by the age of two, hearing children perceived their parents’ deafness well enough to know automatically that they must use gestures with their parents and other deaf people. If the children talked at all, their voices had an unusual quality and they exaggerated their mouth movements. These same children immediately changed their mode into natural speaking voices when communicating with hearing people. The oldest child of deaf parents usually, of necessity, becomes a lifelong guide and interpreter to the parents, even as toddlers alerting the adults to a knock at the door or thunder rumbling outside before a storm. (Walker, 54)

Training manuals for sign language interpreters frequently identify CODAS, who often acquire ASL before spoken language, as the most proficient professional interpreters.

A friend who has deaf daughter told me the story of the daughter receiving a ticket for the child not being strapped into his car seat in the back. The child had unbuckled it to crawl over to sign to her that a police car was behind them with the lights flashing.

It is not uncommon for deaf people to invoke the wrath of traffic police for failing to pull over ignoring sirens and loudspeakers.

When a child is born "deaf" to parents who both possess full hearing, the instinctive role of the parents is to protect and nourish their child until it can become self-sufficient in the world. Denial sometimes accompanies the parents reaction to detection of the child’s deafness; sometimes feelings of embarrassment and guilt. The mother is particularly vulnerable to an unconscious sense of failure for not producing a perfectly normal baby. Deafness is a condition which is not visible in the outward appearance of a child. When a deaf baby seems fully and normally developed in every way, perfectly healthy, the parents might attempt to ignore the invisible deafness, hoping that hearing is simply delayed and will eventually become normal.

This reaction may delay development even further. The most critical factor in the intellectual and social development of the new baby is acquisition of a language with which to learn about the self and its position in the world. Without hearing, the spoken language of the parents is of little or no use to the deaf child. If the parents cannot present a language model which the child can perceive in the home environment, development may be delayed until the child enters an environment which includes a language model that it can see, such as a manually signed language. For many deaf children, the first contact with a complete visual language model doesn’t occur until entering a residential school for the deaf at age five.

Some deaf children born into hearing families struggle through their early years, communicating basic needs, wants and observations with siblings and parents by using gestures, pantomime and homemade signs. Without acquisition of a true language with a complete grammatical structure, the child’s self concept may be limited to functioning within the present, immediate environment, perceived directly through the senses, like an animal. Without a fully functioning, two-way information system the ability to conceptualize a metaphysical, abstract reality, expressed through literature, philosophy and politics with subtlety, paradox, irony and analogy may be unattainable.

Many deaf children growing up in hearing households find it difficult to break through the language barrier to develop intimate relationships with non-signing relatives. Significant stimulation may not occur and fulfilling relationships may not form until the child enters a signing environment.

The learning which begins with language acquisition allows for the forming of primary emotional relationships, bonding with those who reveal or share the discoveries of life through shared communication. These primary bonds last a lifetime. For hearing children who acquire language and knowledge at home from parents and siblings, these primary relationships are established within the family. Deaf children have traditionally established them in the state residential schools. In Growing Old in Silence, Gaylene Becker’s analysis of these socializing factors among the students of residential schools form the basis of her thesis that Deaf communities are better adapted to the challenges of aging, having large extended families of old, intimate school friends. At an early age they necessarily developed strategies for coping with loneliness and isolation in languagelessness or few signing partners to share with.

Both the language and cultural information of the Deaf have been disseminated through generations in the residential schools for the deaf. The traditions are absorbed formally through the curriculum and programs and informally through the incidental sharing and learning experiences which accompany dorm life. The authors of Signing Naturally report that "even when signs were not permitted in the classroom, the children of Deaf parents, as well as Deaf teachers and staff, would secretly pass on the language to other students".

In her poignant and personal memoir, Train Go Sorry, Leah Hager Cohen tells of growing up in a hearing family surrounded by Deaf culture. Her parents were longtime employees of New York’s oldest school for the Deaf, the Lexington School, and her paternal grandparents were both deaf and Deaf. As trends in the education of deaf children have shifted since her childhood at Lexington, she raises significant questions about the role of residential schools for the deaf in preserving and disseminating the unique culture and language of the Deaf:

Deaf people, unlike members of other disabled groups, have their own language. They have their own social clubs and athletic leagues, their own theater companies and television programs, their own university, their own periodicals, and their own international Olympics. Unlike members of ethnic minority groups, they do not receive their culture through their parents. Cultural transmission, formally and informally, has been carried out by schools for the deaf. In practice, few public schools can offer what most prelingually deaf children need: a visually oriented setting, communication access to all activities, interaction with deaf peers and deaf adults, and at least minimal sign language fluency on the part of teachers and peers. And no public school can offer the richness and nurturance of a deaf cultural environment." (Cohen 55-56)

A popular theory of language acquisition, articulated by the linguist Noam Chomsky, holds that a child’s brain naturally possesses a capacity for language, much like the hard-drive in a personal computer waiting to be filled up with software files. Upon exposure to a complete language system, even for a brief time, the mind codes the stimulus into a permanent language structure. Chomsky reiterates the position of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the 19th century German linguist, in describing that "... language is not really learned-certainly not taught-but rather develops ‘from within,’ in an essentially predetermined way, when the appropriate environmental conditions exist." (Chomsky 76).

Oliver Sacks applies this theory to deaf children exposed to ASL:

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. (Sacks 47n)

Sacks refers to a study conducted by S. Goldin-Meadow and H. Feldman of a class of profoundly deaf preschool students, separated from the signing environment by directive of the parents who requested the "oral" method-exclusive training in speech and lip-reading-for their children:

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. The ‘home signs’ 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. (Sacks 46n)

Once the mind has acquired a grammatical structure, information can be processed and experienced in abstract terms which were previously unavailable to the child. Information can begin to accumulate and coalesce into a meaningful understanding of relationships in the world. The child can finally become a full participant in his social environment, rather than a passive, isolated and mostly confused observer.

Right Brain/Left Brain:

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks summarizes studies which indicate that the brain of the native signer is typically more balanced in development of the two hemispheres than those of native speakers. Signed languages are both visually complex, moving through both time and 3-D space as perceived in the right hemisphere and linguistically complex in grammar, syntax and vocabulary, which are processed in the left. (Equal stimulation to the language carrying left and the visual, analogic, holistic right).

Research into the dreams of deaf people has led researchers to theorize that deaf people think the way hearing/speaking people dream. Deaf people’s thought processes, because they are so pictographic, are really more like dreams. Interestingly, very few deaf people report using sign language in their dreams. (From A Loss for Words, 160)

Adolescents and adults without language:

Many historical examples of languageless deaf adolescents and adults have been documented - Hellen Keller, Kaspar Houser, Jean Massieu, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, ...

In A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller describes her chance meeting of a 27 year old deaf man who, raised in a rural area of southern Mexico, had never been exposed to education or sign language:

I always tell people that meeting Ildefonso, the hero of this book, was the most exciting event in my life. Until I met him I had never imagined that a person could live without language. But there he was, a man cut off from the rest of us, who didn’t even know that such a thing as language existed. (Schaller 17)

Her story recounts her attempts to teach him language without a common base to work from. After six months of daily contact, she was forced to relocate before Ildefonso’s eventual awakening to language through ASL and the subsequent transformation of his perception of the world and his place in it. When she returned years later and tracked him down, he was able to tell here what his world had been like when they first met.

Harlan Lane retells the story of Jean Massieu in his recounting of the early history of the deaf through the character of America’s first great deaf hero (albeit imported), Laurent Clerc, co-founder of the first School for the Deaf in the U.S. A languageless boy until the age of 14, Massieu became a student of Abbe Sicard, the pioneering teacher of the deaf in France during the age of the French Revolution. In response to Sicard’s methods, which incorporated the French sign language from which ASL has evolved, Massieu was able to become fluent in both Sign and written French (Lane, When 17-25).

In the absence of a complete language system, these individuals invented methods of contact with varying degrees of success, in desperate attempts to connect with the people and events surrounding them. Their eventual transformation through language included a radical expansion of the dimensions of self by access to the experiences of others.

Oralism vs signed communication in teaching deaf children:

In the past, educational practices for the deaf were polarized between "oralism", which in its pure form provides rigorous training in lip reading and vocalizing at the strict exclusion of any manual communication, or training through the use of a purely manual communication system at the exclusion of voicing. Today the prevalent method of teaching deaf children adopts "total communication" which is a combination of both. Schooling options now include the regional day schools for the deaf, mainstreaming in local public schools for hearing children, and residential state schools for the deaf. Of the three, the residential school offers the best opportunity for immersion into the visual language of signs and the shared cultural nuances of the Deaf community. But with the popularity of the mainstreaming option, an option which allows children to remain in the family home, state residential schools are rapidly closing throughout America, and with them the bastions of Deaf culture.

When the Mind Hears pages 386 - 397:

The most disabling political defeat for Deaf culture came with the Congress of Milan, in 1880, forbidding signing in the education of the Deaf in favor of oralism, therefore eliminating all Deaf teachers from the schools. The political influence in America of Horace Mann and Alexander Graham Bell, who was married to a deaf woman, led to the adoption of the oral method in virtually all of the American schools for the deaf - with the predominance of hearing administrators and teachers for nearly a century, until the 1970's. It wasn’t until the famous student demonstrations in the Spring of 1988, that even Gallaudet University, America’s first and only Liberal Arts University for the deaf, succumbed to the hiring a deaf president.

For nearly 100 years the first 10 years or more of a deaf child’s education was dominated by intensive drilling towards reading lips and using the voice to approximate fluent speech. The noble goal of the oralist method is to help the deaf child become successfully integrated into the dominant hearing culture. But the great majority of cases for those decades produced children who could only pass for hearing with superficial voicing skills and ineffective speechreading at the expense of the most crucial years of mental, social and emotional development - learning about the world and its marvelous complexities. The ASL supporters propose helping the deaf child to first acquire the visual language of signs, preferably from a native signer, and then use that language to fully educate the child, including training in English as a second language.

Problems with Oralism:

Suppose you never heard voices or words. What would your inner voice sound like?

Deaf studies have revealed that prelingually deaf people, those who were born without hearing or lost it before acquiring spoken language, have no interior monologue. In most of us there is a tiny voice we consult as part of our thought processes. Deaf people literally don’t hear themselves thinking. Scientists speculate that we begin recording this inner voice from the moment we are born, or possibly even from the womb, where the amniotic fluid conducts sound through the abdominal wall during fetal development. This is the voice that dictates all of our writing. A good writer is said to have a good inner voice. Many deaf people who have no voice sometimes have to finger-spell or sign to themselves to make sure of the spelling of a word or the phrasing of a sentence. (Re: Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words, page 160).

Studies conducted in the late 1950's at the oralism based Tracy School in California (founded by Spencer Tracy to assist the education of his deaf child) illustrated problems inherent in speechreading. Nondeaf college Sophomores who had never studied speech reading were more successful at it than deaf persons to whom it had been taught throughout most of their school careers. The better performance was attributed to the nondeaf sophomores normal language base - phonetic, semantic, and syntactic - enabling them to determine by guessing the words they could not speechread. It is helpful to remember that 40 - 60% of English sounds appear to be identical on the lips and mouth to other sounds. The letters "p" and "b" look exactly the same on the lips, as do the terms maybe, baby and pay me; kite, height, and night. A person without an adequate language base to fill in the gaps understands very little. In fact, even the best speechreaders in a one-to-one situation were found to understand only 26% of what was said. Many bright deaf individuals grasp less than five percent (From A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, pg. 18). As a hearing person, try to watch the TV newscaster’s talking head and with your familiarity with English and even the context of current events, see how much you can understand.

Added to the confusion are English words which sound the same but have different spellings and meanings like the spoken word Red (or Read).

Triumph of ASL:

Over the past few decades the shift from an audiological to a cultural approach to analyzing deafness has yielded additions to education curricula of both hearing and deaf schools, high schools and colleges. Through the work of pioneering language researchers like William Stokoe of Gallaudet College (1950’s) and Edward Klima and Ursulla Bellugi of the Salk Institute (1970’s), American Sign Language (ASL) has finally been recognized as a complete and independent language system with a unique grammar, syntax and vocabulary. The individual components (signs) have been found to function as symbols of abstract concepts rather than translations of words from spoken English (Sacks, 78-80).

ASL is not a universal signed language, but today is found in use throughout the U.S. and Canada. It originated from a combination of French Sign Language brought in 1817 to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Conn., the first in America founded by its co-founder and first deaf teacher, Laurent Clerc (founded with Thomas Gallaudet) and the British Sign Language brought to Martha’s Vinyard in the early 17^th century by the immigrants from the region of Kent, England. Since Martha’s Vinyard is near Hartford, most of the deaf children were sent to the school in Conn. and brought their signs to merge with the French signs of Clerc’s.

High School and College campuses throughout America now offer American Sign Language as an option in fulfilling graduation requirements of courses in a second language (Wilcox, Academic. Wilcox, "Foreign"). In Signing Naturally, a beginning text in ASL, authors Cheri Smith, Ella Mae Lentz, and Ken Mikos summarize this new acceptance:

Linguistic research demonstrates that ASL is comparable in complexity and expressiveness to spoken languages. ... It has its own distinct grammatical structure, which must be mastered in the same way as the grammar of any other language. ASL differs from spoken languages in that it is visual rather than auditory and is composed of precise handshapes and movements. ... ASL is capable of conveying subtle, complex and abstract ideas. Signers can discuss philosophy, literature, or politics as well as football, cars or income taxes. Sign language can express poetry as poignantly as can any spoken language and can communicate humor, wit, and satire just as bitingly.

The syntax (word order) of ASL is similar to several Romance languages in its presenting of the main topic before qualifiers. Time is established first.

The statement in English - "I will go to my Aunt’s house tomorrow"

would translate into ASL as "Tomorrow - house -my Aunt, hers - go to - I"

The word for word transliteration of English glosses of the signs sounds strange and can be misinterpreted as illiterate or uneducated when read.

Literate3D with words (literature) and of course signing doesn’t use words.

To appreciate the meanings of signs, they must be experienced as a fluid mode of communication, rather than a translation. ASL literature incorporates visual relationships of alliteration (repetition of handshape) and visual puns (handshapes resembling objects or events).

Courses in Deaf studies have been added to anthropology curricula surveying the historical, literary and political components of Deaf culture. In Train Gone Sorry ( meaning something like "missed the boat"), Cohen shares a poem produced for a student journal assignment in Lexington’s high school Deaf studies class:

"Who am I?"

I found out that who I am.

I am Deaf and Jewish girl.

I learned a lot about deaf culture and deaf’s language. Before Deaf Studies I was negative that I am Deaf because I grew up in Russia. In Russia for deaf people didn’t have ability to successful of their goal. Also no technology for Deaf people. That why I thought always I was negative.

After Deaf Studies I learned a lot. In U.S.A. had tty, closed captioned and technology for deaf. Many deaf people has ability to be successful their goal or dream. Now, I am proud of me and everybody who are deaf. Also has club, college, universitet and good school, community for Deaf. I can do anything I want.

My favorite issue or sentence:

"Deaf can do it except hear." (Cohen 31)

Frank Herbert 8/13/00