PsychoLinguistics

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF CHILDREN
IN ACQUIRING LANGUAGE


This paper is made as the requirement of final assignment of Psycholinguistics




By:

Eva Nur Mazidah 120710209
Rita Puspitaningrum 120710246




ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
AIRLANGGA UNIVERSITY
2010

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF CHILDREN
IN ACQUIRING LANGUAGE


INTRODUCTION

Around the world, there are found thousands people having hearing loss—deaf—either from birth or injury, accident, etc. When it is from birth, there are some possibilities e.g. meningitis or an inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord (Kail, 2007). Human conversation typically takes place within a frequency range of 200 to 800 Hz (around 60 decibels). Deaf people have limitation in hearing the loudness of the signal. Several symptoms can be detected for instances baby never responds to sudden loud sounds, never turns its head to react sound in age of 4 or 5 months, does not respond when its name is called at age of 8 or 9 months, does not imitate speech sound and simple words at the age of 12 months. It is also possible that those children born from hearing couple, hearing and deaf couple or deaf couple. It might not be too serious problem if they are born I deaf family because they will acquire the same langrage. It will be very difficult in other side when they are born around normal people because they will be forced to acquire what they are not able—spoken language.
In fact, hearing people find difficulties to communicate with deaf people. One of the ways to communicate with them is through sign language. Kyle and Woll (1985) emphasizes it is neither a new language nor a new system developed by haring people; rather it is naturally occurring form of communication among deaf people. Linguists have come to analyze it as a true natural language. It shares features grammatical processes with other spoken language.
Language develops time after time not only in spoken language but also in sign language. They are for instance Dalgano’s alphabet, Digiti Lingua—old form 18th and 19th century and modern form—for finger spellings--, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL).
When hearing children are exposed to learn the spoken language of their parents and of society, the deaf children, in another side, are also expected to achieve the same goal. Education for deaf children begins at the age of 3 years or earlier—family interaction (Kyle and Woll, 1985). During their first year parents will often be uncertainty towards their children’s deafness. Indeed the way their parents treat them may be different. Some methods used to treat their children resembled a speech mediation program e.g. hearing aid. Truly the deaf children are linguistically inept and need careful tutoring to learn language. Meadow (1972) found that deaf children (average age 14 months) had a language age of 28 months or less. It shows that there is a delay in deaf children’s degree of acquiring language—low. When they are exposed to lip reading or speech comprehension, there are no significant improvements as they grow older. . In their longitudinal study of milestone in word acquisition by deaf children aged from 15-18 months to 4 years, they found that the first word appearing at an average age of 16 months,10 words at 23 months, 50 words at 29 months and 100 words at 34 months(compared to hearing children 11, 12, 19 and 20 respectively (Kyle, 1981). To conclude these, the language development of deaf children is highly different either in quality and speed of development.
There are reviews on how deaf children develop socially and emotionally. From studies, deaf children are immature, disassociated or aloof, impulsive or lacking insight, lacking f self-confidence or initiative. Somehow, in other side, they have degree of maturity correlated with communicative competence (Kyle and Woll, 1985).
In this paper, some subtopics are discussed namely the grammar of the sign language—BSL and ASL, the language acquisition of deaf children, the acquisition of sign, verbal language, non-verbal language, and their combination.


RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. What kind of language is used by deaf children or people? How is the morphology and syntax of their grammar--BSL?
2. How do deaf children acquire sign, verbal language, non-verbal language and their combination?


METHODOLOGY

This paper will be done with library study. Our focus is on the journals and researches about deafness, especially in children. We try to find from those data the sign used by the deaf children and how they acquire them. We also try to find comparison between hearing children and deaf children in the aspects of acquiring sign and language.
We then try to analyze the data we get from the books, journals and research to find the conclusion about what kind of language is used by deaf children or people, how the morphology and syntax of their grammar—BSL is, and how the deaf children acquire their language, especially for those under five years old. We hope that this library study can be used as a help for another research or data collection.


ANALYSIS

A. Sign Morphology and Syntax: the Grammar of British Sign Language
The morphology of BSL is very complex-relatively inflected-that specific information about case, number, aspect and tense is found. One of the specific information is number. It is either plural or singular marking of nouns. If English uses –s as the marker, BSL shows plurality by repeating a sign rather than by suffixing some elements. Next, it is about classifiers. Both ASL and BSL construct and be labeled as predicate classifier language e.g. a BSL verb stem meaning ‘to go under a bridge’ is presented by motion of the right hand under the left hand. Hand-shapes can function as number inserted into signs with temporal meaning classifiers (by means of indicating number in sign morphology). Move to case and role, in BSL, information is conveyed by in an entirely different way. In English conversation, speakers may point to locations indicating a person or object. BSL and other sign language somehow use combination of conventionalized, relative and real locations. For years, it was a fact that sign language had no tens system, unlike spoken language (present, past and future). Recently, it indicates that at least two ways can be used to indicate tense or time relationship in BSL and that may be like English for at least some verbs. It is done by adverbial modification e.g. TOMORROW, YESTERDAY I COOK, etc. (Kyle and Woll, 1985).
As with morphology, the analysis of BSL syntax here will look at how different types of sentence are formed. There are some possibilities in word order typology e.g. subject-verb-object, verb-subject-object, topic-comment, and s on. English has S-V-O typology, ASL uses S-V-O (Fischer, 1975) while BSL uses topic-comment (Deuchar, 1983). Look at the example below
VO CLEAN ALL (I cleaned everything) (T) C
OV TEN.p.PUT.IN (I put in lop) T C
SV FATHER FALL (Father fell) TC
If those three sentences are analyzed, there are three different sentences. Here Deuchar analyzes themas topic-comment because topics may have generally recordings of spontaneous singing. They believe that in the simultaneous use of both handy in topic-comment construction.
Apparently all languages have sentence types e.g. declarative and interrogative. These two types are usually treated by their word order. If spoken language intonation can influence whether the sentence is either declarative or interrogative, BSL uses facial expression as the role of intonation. To ask WH-question, they share a hand-shape and movement (five fingers extended, separated and wiggling) (Kyle and Woll, 1985). They include holding hands out, fingers pointing away, palm up, heel of hand higher than fingertips; pointing addressee; prolonging the duration of the last sign or facial expression, etc.

Kyle and Woll resume the early development studies, 0-2 years
.


These are the findings by Volterra (1983) about the

B. Deaf children’s acquisition of sign, verbal language, non-verbal language, and their combination
The factor helping deaf children in acquiring sign and competence according to Erting (1978, 1980) and Meadow (1980) is the interaction with older deaf children and adults. And it is proven that, according to Carol J. Earting’s research, the deaf children who have deaf parents or who interact with older deaf children or adults (e.g. teacher) can acquire sign and competence easily.
The research done by Erting has effectively shown us the fact that interaction between deaf children and older deaf children and adults are more effective in helping the children acquire the sign.
However, there is still another question arise from this problem: how the deaf children acquire those kinds of languages. It will be focused on the quantity of the kinds of language used by them.
In the research of Martha Gonter Gaustad, the participants of the research are twins with one deaf and one hearing. She tries to analyze how they duffer in acquiring verbal and non verbal language. on her research, Gaustad argued that there are general differences both in the amount of communication provided to each twin and the kinds of input directed to the deaf and hearing twins.
Gaustad (in Strong 1990, p.236) focused on the examination of communication mode included both receptive and expressive aspects with regard to each twin. The communication will be classified into four types: (1) gestures (GES): non verbal, which included headshakes and attention-getting devices; (2) voice-only (VO): words or interpretable approximations; (3) sign-only (SO): signs or interpretable approximations, pointing, and so on; (4) combined vocal and manual (VM): speech (approximation) accompanying sign (approximation).
However, to answer the research question number one, I only use some parts of her research. In here I only focus on how the deaf children acquire the language—verbal and non-verbal—to finally find the quantity of types of language used by them.
Below are the tables showing the percentage of receptive and expressive communication to each twin by modality and interlocutors, at three age periods:

TABLE I. PERECENTAGE OF RECEPTIVE COMMUNICATION TO DEAF CHILD BY MODALITY AND INTERLOCUTOR, AT THREE AGE PERIODS
Gesture Sign only Combined Voice only
(to) deaf child
16-18 months (N=274)
Mother 15 56 29 0
Father 6 34 57 3
Hearing adults (researches) 1 3 87 9
% total 7 31 58 4
19-21 months (N=177)
Mother 0 100 0 0
Father 0 58 42 0
Hearing adults (researches) 1 1 89 9
% total 0 53 44 3
22-24 months (N=202)
Mother 3 52 45 0
Father 9 77 9 5
Hearing adults (researches) 3 17 67 13
% total 5 49 40 6
Means (%) (N=653)
Mother 6 69 25 0
Father 5 56 36 3
Hearing adults (researches) 2 7 81 10
% total 4 44 48 4


TABLE I. PERECENTAGE OF RXPRESSIVE COMMUNICATION TO DEAF CHILD BY MODALITY AND INTERLOCUTOR, AT THREE AGE PERIODS
Gesture Sign only Combined Voice only
(from) deaf child
16-18 months (N=115)
Mother 7 93 0 0
Father 10 90 0 0
Hearing adults (researches) 27 73 0 0
% total 15 85 0 0
19-21 months (N=131)
Mother 25 75 0 0
Father 12 88 0 0
Hearing adults (researches) 13 85 2 0
% total 17 82 1 0
22-24 months (N=117)
Mother 12 88 0 0
Father 28 72 0 0
Hearing adults (researches) 18 81 1 0
% total 19 81 0 0
Means (%) (N=363)
Mother 15 85 0 0
Father 17 83 0 0
Hearing adults (researches) 19 80 1 0
% total 17 83 0 0

From the data above, we can see that the total percentage of sign-only and combined language used by mother ad father when talking to the deaf child is almost the same. The hearing adults, in this case the researchers; mostly use the combined language, and sometimes the voice-only. They almost never use the sign-only. In the first table we can see that the deaf parents hardly ever use the voice-only language.
From the second table, we can see that the deaf child tend to use sign-only when speaking to mother and father. He also uses sign-only when speaking to the researchers. Sometimes, he uses gestures and can be said “never” use the voice-only and combined language.
Simply we can say that in the communication among deaf persons, deaf children tend to use sign-only. The gestures are preferred rather than the voice-only and combined language. Meanwhile, deaf adults sometimes also use combined language when speaking to deaf children.
In the communication with hearing adults, in most cases the deaf children use sign only when speaking to them. In other side, the hearing adults tend to use combined language when speaking to the deaf children.
Sign and Spoken Language Comparison (Kyle and Woll, 1985)


Spoken Sign
Instrument Air, larynx, tongue, etc Hands, body, etc.
Production Articulated speech Articulated signing
Phonemes of a language Cheremes of language
Reception Ears Eyes
Units Morphemes, words,etc. Morphemes, sign, stc.
Combination Grammar of a given spoken language Grammar of a given sign language
Universal features Only certain types of structure occur Only certain types of structures occur
Each spoken language uses a subset of their structures Each sign language uses a subset of these structures
Features also occur in sign language Features also occur in spoken language



CONCLUSION
Based on the analysis about the grammar of sign language used by deaf people, it is found that their grammar is not the same as the hearing. They have their own grammar. If we compare between deaf and hearing people grammar, it is for sure that deaf people or children’ grammar is grammatically incorrect at some stages. They do not use inflections, auxiliary verbs, etc. However their way of spelling is often accurate because they also learn about finger-spellings. That is why they are said to be slow in developing reading skills because they encounter a weak basis of spoken language.
As the answer for the research question number two, we try to conclude, and our conclusions are mentioned below:
1. Deaf children tend to use sign-only when speaking to hearing adults and deaf adults.
2. Deaf adults tend to use sign-only and combined language when speaking to deaf children.
3. Hearing adults tend to use the combination of verbal and non verbal language.
The differences are possibly caused by some factors and causing another impacts. However, those are not examined here since we only focus on the quantity of types of language acquire by the deaf children accompanied by the language used by people surrounding them.


REFFERENCES

Deuchar, M. 1983. Is British language an SVO Language ? In Kyle and Woll (1983).
Fischer, S. D. 1975. Influences in on Word Order Change in American Language. In C. N. Li, (ed.) Word Order and Word Order Change. Austin: University of Rexas Press.
Fodor, Jerry A., et al. 1974. The Psychology of Language: An introduction to Psycholinguistis and Generative Grammar. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
Gaustad, Martha G. Communication in Twins of Deaf Parents in Fodor J. A et al. (1974)
Kail, Roert V. 2007. Children and Their Development. Fourth Edition. NY: Prentice Hall Inc.
Kyle, J. G. 1981. Reading Development in Deaf Children. Journal of Research in Reading, 3: 86-87.
Kyle, J. G. and Woll, B. 1985. Sign language: the Study of Deaf People and Their Language. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Meadow, K. P. 1980. Deafness and Child Development. London: E. Arnold.
Strong, Michael (ed). 1990. Language Learning and Deafness. Cambridge: Cambridge University.