I Can Hear You Whisper (30 page)

On the other hand, many researchers argue that the
emphasis on phonology is misplaced for deaf readers. In a recent review, Rachel Mayberry, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, analyzed the results of fifty-seven studies testing the relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability in deaf individuals, and found that phonology didn't matter much. Only half of the studies had found statistically significant evidence that the deaf readers were using phonological awareness. Overall, phonological skills accounted for only 11 percent of the difference in reading abilities. A bigger factor seemed to be “language ability,” which referred to fluency in either English or sign language, depending on the person's preferred mode of communication. In the seven studies where it was measured, that language skill accounted for 35 percent of the difference in reading abilities.

Mayberry is among those who have shown that deaf children of deaf parents with high proficiency in ASL are stronger readers than deaf children with hearing parents who have delayed exposure to ASL (and no real spoken language). The mean reading level of the group with strong ASL skills was post–high school; the mean reading level of those with late exposure to language—ASL or English—and who had poorer ASL skills was between third and fourth grade. (Individuals with cochlear implants or good early oral language were not included.) That is a dramatic difference, showing clearly that ASL as a first language is not an impediment to literacy and is quite possibly a boon. There is a caveat: The study is correlational, as deaf education expert Marc Marschark noted to me, meaning that strong ASL skills and strong reading skills appear together in this group, but not that one necessarily causes the other. What it does demonstrate is that lack of early language is an enormous problem with long-term implications. Presumably, the deaf-of-deaf children spent a lot of time communicating with their parents in their early years. The other children, who effectively had no language until they reached school, could not possibly have done so. That is why the two clear, inarguable messages of Mayberry's work and many other studies are those that Marschark stresses: Early access to language—any language—and parent-child interaction matter more than anything else.

It's partly for this reason that groups like the American Society for Deaf Children, which has a membership of about three thousand families, advocate for exposure to ASL for all deaf children with whatever auditory input families want added on. The group's president, Beth Benedict, who teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at Gallaudet, told me that the group sees it not as a question of options or choices but of opportunities. “Too many of my students didn't know ASL until much later,” she wrote to me. “Too often their audiologists told them not to sign. In fact, many said their spoken and written English improved after learning ASL.” She points to research like Mayberry's that shows the benefits of ASL for language development, and says that it also boosts self-confidence. ASL allows deaf children to meet deaf adults and be part of the Deaf community. “If they grow up in isolation,” says Benedict, “they wouldn't know if they are capable of doing this and that.”

What about cochlear implants? The logical assumption is that the access to sound that implants provide helps boost phonological awareness and that in turn boosts reading levels and academic achievement. Ken Pugh agreed this ought to be so. “Anything that provides spoken language to a child is likely to have implications for learning to read,” he says. “But having said that, there are seriously good minds out there who are skeptical of that intuition. [Maybe] ultimately you can use lots of codes to support brain plasticity.” For her part, Karen Emmorey, who studies the neurobiology of ASL, told me, “So much has been done looking at phonology, it's clearly key for hearing kids. It may be key for some [deaf] kids, but for some deaf kids not. . . . Something else is going on. It does seem to be that it's language that's critical.”

In practice, there aren't a lot of results on reading or literacy skills beyond fourth grade in children with cochlear implants.
What limited data there is hasn't been as dramatic as expected. “Not everybody ends up doing so well with reading,” says Pugh, even among kids who respond well to cochlear implants.

Just as with dyslexia, the hope is that the brain will hold the answers. For example, Haskins and University of Connecticut researcher Heather Bortfeld is looking at the brains of babies and toddlers before and after they get cochlear implants and plans to follow them into elementary school and literacy. “There are a lot of open questions, but there are some principles that must span all of this,” says Pugh. “The neural tissue that represents language must become reorganized in literacy.” When we spoke, he had just returned from a conference in Taiwan and was embarking on a major study of literacy in four different spoken languages. “Vastly different writing systems end up with very similar patterns in the brain, because the job of the brain is to rewire and become multimodal in some sense. I think this is true whether you have input from the ear or not.”

W
hen my work faltered,” wrote the author Josh Swiller of a time when he was trying to write a novel while teaching at Gallaudet, “I stared at the students hanging out in the parking area. Their signing was beautiful: With their hands and arms and bodies, they carved up and fluffed out the space in front of them. They made that space breathe and filled it with energy and moved that energy around, flattening it, kneading it, passing it back and forth. . . . Watching them I thought again about what it meant to be deaf.”

Reading that, I thought yes, me too. Swiller is deaf himself, but he is more like Alex than the average Gallaudet student—he was raised oral, using cued speech and hearing aids, and he got a cochlear implant as an adult. He spent a few years at Gallaudet, however, exploring other ways of being deaf.

We were about to do something similar, in a much smaller way. That was why our doorbell rang one evening shortly after dinner.

“She's here,” I called and went to open the door.

A woman in her thirties with blue eyes and dark auburn hair stood on the stoop. She smiled and raised her hand in greeting. I raised mine in response and then drew my arm back to indicate the hall behind me and welcome her in.

Roni was an ASL tutor and this was to be our first lesson. Mark and the boys and our babysitter, Yvi, all congregated in the living room.

“Hi,” said Jake shyly.

“Hi,” said Matthew.

Then, embarrassed, they realized Roni couldn't hear them.

Again, she smiled and raised her right hand to give them all a crisp half wave, half salute and show them how to say hello.

They waved and sat down.

We were all a little unsure of ourselves. Roni was the first guest we'd ever had who communicated only in sign language.

As an ASL tutor, Roni had met many people like us and was used to our awkwardness. She took a seat in the living room and pulled out a digital tablet for writing notes and a pack of vocabulary flash cards. She waved her hand to get everyone's attention. Even to introduce ourselves, we had to learn to fingerspell the alphabet. So we started there. She wrote down the boys' names on the tablet and pointed at them quizzically to establish who was who. Then she showed them how to spell their names. When Alex's attention wandered and he looked around the room, she stamped her foot on the floor to bring his eyes back to her. She wouldn't just be teaching us to sign, she'd be teaching us how to interact with a signing deaf person. Rule number one: You have to make eye contact.

 • • • 

The fall from the ladder and the subsequent, though temporary, loss of what remained of Alex's hearing had goaded us into action. From the beginning, we had said that Alex would learn ASL as a second language. And we'd meant it—in a vague, well-intentioned way. Though I used a handful of signs with him in the first few months, those had fallen away once he started to talk. I was thrilled with his progress, with the cochlear implant, with the help he'd gotten at Clarke, but I regretted letting sign language lapse. I was sorry now I hadn't borrowed those baby sign language videos from my friends in Brooklyn.

Even before the additional hearing loss and in spite of my misgivings over the most recent protests at Gallaudet, I had begun to think we needed to get serious about ASL. I never wanted there to come another day when we couldn't communicate at all—in the bath or swimming pool, for instance, or if Alex's equipment malfunctioned. The fall had been a stark reminder both of how much of a difference the hearing in his left ear made and of how precarious it was. I had another reason, too. I wanted Alex to know that Deaf culture was out there.

The summer he was five, while on vacation at the beach we met a thirteen-year-old girl who had recently gotten a cochlear implant. Her mother told me her daughter could understand much of what she heard, but I could see that she still had trouble speaking. She and Alex turned their heads to show each other the processors sitting atop their ears. The girl started to sign to Alex, then stopped when she saw his blank look.

“Does he sign?” she asked.

“No,” I said a little sheepishly. It was clear that I didn't, either. I couldn't even remember the sign for
NO
.

Even if Alex might never need ASL to communicate, he might like to know it. And he might someday feel a need to know more deaf people. At school, there were two other boys in his grade who used hearing aids, so he wasn't completely alone. All three had FM systems, which had turned out to be a microphone that accentuates the teacher's voice over classroom din, so that most of the kindergarten teachers had a transmitter slung around their necks at some point in the day. His closest friends were hearing, however. Socially, he seemed to be holding his own. The year before, one little girl had amazed me by announcing that Alex was “the funniest boy in the class.” In retrospect, I realized he had earned that accolade by launching into a silly nonsensical monologue whenever he couldn't follow the conversation. Four-year-olds have a low threshold for hilarity.

“Good coping skills,” remarked his teacher of the deaf, David Spritzler, who visited the classroom a few hours a week.

All the same, I wondered about his sense of self. Even I didn't know whether to call him deaf or hard of hearing, and I didn't get much help from other deaf people on that front.

“Why not say he's deaf?” one asked when I said he was hard of hearing.

But another, when I described him as deaf, said of herself, “I'm deaf; he's hard of hearing.”

Either way, he was getting older, old enough to know that he was different from his father and me, different from his brothers, different from most of his peers. How would he feel about himself at six, at sixteen, at twenty-six? With whom would he feel the most affinity: hearing children, deaf children generally, deaf children with implants?

We began looking for opportunities to meet other kids like him. In New York City, there were reunions at his old school, Clarke, and events at the Center for Hearing and Communication, the organization that had worked with Caitlin Parton. At the biannual conferences put on by AG Bell, the listening and spoken language advocacy group, I could sit in on sessions about education or technology and Alex could go to a camp full of kids with implants and hearing aids.

The first morning of our first conference, when our family arrived at the hotel's restaurant for breakfast, there was someone at nearly every table with a cochlear implant.

“Wow, Alex,” Jake whispered loudly. “Look!”

Alex surveyed the room. His eyes widened, then he smiled and sat up a little taller. While the boys swam and played games with the other children, I found myself gravitating to the talks in which deaf students and adults shared their experiences.

 • • • 

When William Stokoe first began his work classifying the structures within sign language, no one took him seriously. Surely, went the conventional wisdom, sign language was nothing more than a collection of gestures or pantomime. “Almost everyone, hearing and deaf alike, at first regarded Stokoe's notions as absurd or heretical; his books, when they came out, as worthless or nonsensical. . . .
This is often the way with works of genius,” wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks in
Seeing Voices
, his book on sign language and the deaf. “But within a very few years . . . the entire climate of opinion had been changed, and a revolution—a double revolution—was under way: a scientific revolution, paying attention to sign language, and its cognitive and neural substrates, as no one had ever thought to do before; and a cultural and political revolution.”

Stokoe may have started that scientific revolution, but it was Ursula Bellugi who led it. She and her husband, Ed Klima, were newly married linguists in 1968, when they moved to La Jolla, California, where Klima took a job in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Bellugi went to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where Jonas Salk, interested in expanding the scope of his research institute, had invited Bellugi and Klima to set up a small laboratory. At the time, Bellugi has said,
“essentially nothing was known. . . . We had to ask new questions and invent new ways of answering them.” Their scientific approach and the prestige of the Salk Institute lent the study of sign language new stature.

“They invited deaf people—children and adults, artists and poets and actors—into their lab and asked questions that even deaf people hadn't ever thought of before: What does the speed of signing mean? How are our sentences structured? What is the morphology of our words?” said Carol Padden, who worked in the lab as a graduate student. “It wasn't about helping deaf people; it was about understanding the human capacity for language. Their research legitimized deaf culture and gave us a vocabulary to discuss it, transforming the way that even deaf people talk about themselves.”

For linguists, Bellugi's lab was a thrilling place and time, and over the years it attracted a long list of well-regarded researchers, deaf and hearing—so much so that many of the cognitive scientists I interviewed turned out to have worked there at some point, including Elissa Newport and Ted Supalla (Bellugi introduced them), Helen Neville, Carol Padden, Greg Hickok, and Karen Emmorey.

Bellugi and her colleagues first studied the morphological processes of ASL, establishing the richness of the internal structure of signs that provided meaning. Stokoe had made a start on this, but Bellugi and her collaborators took it further. They documented examples of morphology such as the verb
LOOK-AT
, which is made with the index and middle fingers pointing in a V and moving forward a few inches. Changes in the movement or orientation of the sign alter the meaning: Holding the two fingers still means
STARE
, circling them forward indicates that someone
LOOKS-FOR-A-LONG-TIME
. Tweak the sign again and you can indicate
GAZE
or
WATCH
or other variations on the theme. Bellugi also established that grammar in ASL is conveyed spatially. Pronouns such as
HE
,
SHE
, and
IT
are assigned specific locations. Past and future are generally indicated to the back or front of the body respectively. Noun-verb-object is conveyed in certain “directional” verbs via movement: I
-HELP-YOU
moves from the signer to the other person. Y
OU-HELP-ME
moves in the opposite direction. In an important paper in 1978, Supalla and Newport showed that detailed differences in movement distinguished between a noun and a verb. Tap two fingers from one hand over the first two fingers of the other hand once and you have signed
SIT
. Do it twice and you have signed
CHAIR
.

In keeping with the biological focus of the Salk Institute and with the explosion of interest in the brain in the 1980s and 1990s, Bellugi and Klima also dug into the
neurobiological foundations of sign language. The lab is credited with the groundbreaking discovery that in native speakers—deaf children of deaf parents—the brain organization of spoken and sign languages is remarkably similar. “This confirms at a neurological level that Sign
is
a language and is treated as such by the brain,” wrote Sacks. Grammar and semantics are processed separately, for instance, just as they are in spoken languages. Not everything in the brain is the same, however. Helen Neville has found that an area in the right hemisphere does play a unique role in sign language, showing activity that isn't seen in spoken language. It's still unclear exactly why this area is recruited; one theory is that it enables the use of space for grammar. And there's a catch. This right-hemisphere activity is seen only in native signers, those who learn from a very early age. Like other aspects of language processing, it has a sensitive period and is not seen in anyone who learns ASL after puberty.

Research into ASL has always had a political cast, because ASL itself has such potency. Barbara Kannapell, who founded Deaf Pride in 1972, wrote: “
ASL is the only thing we have that belongs to Deaf people completely.” Not surprisingly, this filter colored some of the scientific work in the early days. I caught up with Carol Padden and Karen Emmorey at a conference in Boston, where both were presenting on their work, to talk about the trajectory of sign language research over the years. “Initially, it was about showing how it was the same [as spoken languages],” says Padden, who won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010 for her study of a Bedouin community where a high incidence of deafness led to the development of a new sign language currently in use by a fourth generation. “Now it's okay to work on how it's different from spoken language.” It's also okay to embrace aspects of ASL like gesture and iconicity, the pictorial representations that do in fact exist in some ASL signs, that hewed too closely to the negative view of sign language in the past, says Emmorey. There is pantomime and gesture in sign language, she says, signing
DANCE
and swaying at the same time by way of example, but her work has shown that such movements use different brain areas from those employed to produce an ASL verb.

The way ASL is learned may change as well. “There's a lot of romanticism about learning through ASL,” says Padden. “A lot of people say [because] they're closing the deaf schools, ASL won't have a context for people to learn the language.” But she has met enough mainstreamed deaf children who've learned to sign as a second language that she's less worried on that front. “I think it's reorganizing,” she says. “ASL is going to be learned in different ways. We're paying less attention to geography and more to identity.”

For Emmorey, who is hearing, an interest in sign language had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the brain. With a PhD in psycholinguistics from UCLA, she says, “I got hooked in terms of thinking about sign language as a tool to ask questions about language and the mind.” When she started, she was a complete beginner at ASL, studying how sign language was organized in the brain by day and taking ASL lessons at night at a community college, the only place she could find a course. Today, at her neurobiology lab at the University of California, San Diego, all communication is in ASL. “I knew I'd arrived when I gave a lecture on cognitive neuroscience in ASL at Gallaudet . . . and people got it,” she says with a laugh.