Sign Language and Deaf Culture

Sign Language and Deaf Culture

Deaf Children Born to Hearing Parents and the Impact on Language Development and Culture

Learning is hard enough for any child, but deaf children are unfortunately faced with an entirely different set of challenges that threatens their ability to find success in academia and in whatever professional endeavors they embark on. With many deaf children being born to hearing parents, there is a disconnect between the caregiver and the infant at a time where language acquisition and learning is at its highest point. This, unfortunately, can result in limited linguistic structures that can haunt children for the rest of their lives, and impact how they perform in school and in the professional world. With the population of deaf children being so culturally vast, it has been hard to design and implement strategies to help encourage early language development for infants with hearing impairment with great success. This then impacts how the children learn to communicate, but also how they view themselves and their role within both deaf and hearing cultural contexts.

Description of the Population

There are millions of children with various levels and degrees of hearing loss or impairment. The research shows that the majority of deaf children being born to hearing parents. In fact, an astounding 90% of all children born deaf have hearing parents (Standley 2005). This then makes the breadth of the population of children born without hearing to hearing parents incredibly diverse.

Age Group: Birth to 14 Years Old

Language acquisition and development begins very early on in life. In order to best understand its role in the facilitation of cognitive development, a discussion of Jean Piaget's developmental stages is necessary. Piaget's theory of cognitive development presents a number of specified stages, including the ones to be examined here: sensorimotor and pre-operational developmental stages. Language is a key element of some of the earliest stages described by Piaget. Essentially, the sensorimotor stage begins at birth and lasts until about two years of age. It is when the infant begins to recognize external objects and concepts around it, as well as how internal manipulation can provide desired results (Salkind 2004). According to the research, "although the sensorimotor stage is the shortest of all stages, its contribution to human development is fundamental. It is in the course of this stage that the child truly becomes a thinking creature," (Anisfield 1985 p 20). It is during this time that language becomes a key factor in how the child organizes new information that is constantly streaming in from the external world around it. The child begins to respond to and articulate language development even in this earliest of stages. The foundations for language acquisition are built here, and then are fine tuned in the next developmental stage (Salkind 2001). The next stage is the pre-operational stage, which lasts from two years to around seven years of age. This is the stage where language is most important, as it becomes a tool for the child to make sense of the external world and reach out to other individuals in meaningful ways. However, if the foundations were not properly built in the sensorimotor stage, language acquisition becomes much harder during this developmental period.

For most deaf children who are born to hearing parents, the transmission of deaf culture, including the use of sign language, does not automatically occur. This is often because communication feasible to deaf children is not perpetuated at the key sensorimotor stage. Rather, deaf children typically gain access to deaf culture and language through schooling or experience with other deaf individuals that occur much later when the child is already past the sensorimotor stage of development. Here, the research suggests that "Significantly, most deaf children not only start learning language later than their peers who share a common language with their parents, but are confronted with less consistent language models when they do start," (Marschuck 2001 p 6). This is a serious issue that threatens to limit deaf children's ability to learn with similar success rates as their hearing counterparts.

Relevant Multicultural Issues

Due to the vast array of cultural contexts that are seen within the deaf population, implementation of early sign language learning is difficult. First, there are problems with bilingual models of implementing sign language learning. ASL is typically spoken in English, and thus it does not often translate well into families that do not speak English as the native language. This only further complicates the child's learning of language, as parents are not able to support what is being learned in regards to signage in external school facilities (Marschuck 2001). Thus, since "deaf children come from culturally diverse families and the home language may also be another minority language that the child is trying to acquire orally," (Standley 2005 p 2180). Moreover, the socioeconomic status of the children within this population plays a crucial role in determining their access to resources. Specialized schools and training in ASL is expensive. Children born in lower socioeconomic classes are often at a much greater disadvantage compared to deaf children in more affluent families. Moreover, families in small communities might have to relocate in order to gain better access to appropriate schools and speech therapy facilities, which also takes a great deal of investment. Parents with college educations and employed fulltime do tend to have children with better academic performance in terms of reading and nonverbal IQ tests (Mayberry 2002). Thus, "socioeconomic status predicts a deaf child's reading achievement," (Mayberry 2002 p 75). Many white children born deaf are exposed to greater outside tools that help create a stronger ability to acquire and use language. Other racial groups, like African-American and Hispanic children are often seen to have lower average reading scores (Mayberry 2002). It is unfortunate that "Socioeconomic status may have a greater impact on the academic attainment of deaf children than that of hearing children," (Mayberry 2002 p 75).

How Hearing Parents React to Their Child's Deafness

There are a number of signs that indicate deafness that can be exhibited by the child as early as a few months. Fortunately, there are a number of tests available to help determine the presence of hearing loss within infants and young children. Still, it is hard for many parents to cope with their child having hearing loss. Parents unfortunately have a hard time accepting their child's deaf status, and usually try to blame themselves or another parent regarding the cause of the child's deafness. This seems to be a typical reaction across races and ethnicities, and thus only further complicates the child's exposure to language and social developmental processes.

Cochlear Implants

The advances of modern technologies have lead to massive improvements in surgical options for restoring various degrees of hearing in deaf children and adults. This has been especially seen in patients who have received a cochlear implant, which is an electric device is implanted into the inner drum of the ear in order to help facilitate hearing despite a lack of hair cells present in the cochlea (Spencer & Marschuck 2006). However, the benefits of the cochlear implant are only really widespread within more affluent societies. The heavy cost of the surgery and the implant itself can tend to be barriers to access for deaf patients in lower socio-economic classes. Additionally, the use of a cochlear implant can drastically influence children's linguistic abilities. Essentially, they are introduced to a new wave of language development in rapid succession that they have to catch up with. Children with cochlear implants then often have very different issues regarding their status in current educational programs (Spencer & Marschuck 2006). They deal with issues that impact both the hearing and non-hearing community.

Early Issues

Moreover, it has been an shown that parents need to express the ability to expose their children to language sets as early as possible. The research shows that "Failure to provide complete and early access to language can have devastating and permanent effects on a child," (Malloy 2003 p 3). Such a void of language learning at this young age can be detrimental to later social and cognitive skills. Thus, many innovators in deaf education are focusing on making parents more active in the learning of language during a crucial developmental stage for language acquisition. The research shows that young infants look for responses from their caregivers within their first year, and without such responses, it is hard for children to acquire the communicative skills they need to function properly later in life (Malloy 2003). Here, the research shows that "the deaf children who showed the highest levels of reading and sign language comprehension tended to have parents who knew and used sign language with them from a very young age -- 3 years or before," (Mayberry 2002 p 74). There are clear signs of increased lingual and reading efficiency of children with hearing loss that were exposed to sign language early on in their infancy. This leads many to support policies that help establish parent workshops to learn sign language while the child is still an infant, in order to best maximize the rapid rate of language acquisition at this young age (Marschuck 2001). There is "evidence that deaf children benefit from early exposure to sign language points to the need for in-depth sign language training for parents and other caregivers, with special attention to underserved populations such as those in rural areas," (Marschuck 2001 p 9). Parents should not rely on external schools at later developmental stages, when the damage to the child's cognitive and linguistic abilities could have already been done.

Chomsky's Developmental Theory

In order to better understand how this issue is such a problem for the population of deaf children born to hearing parents, it is important to explore relevant theoretical models of language acquisition. According to Noam Chomsky's theory of language development, children have an innate ability to learn any form of human communication

(Macaulay 2006). We as human beings are essentially hard-wired to learn language skills and concepts. Here, the research states that "human beings are born with an innate knowledge of how language is structured and use this innate knowledge to work out how to acquire competence in the language to which they are exposed," (Macaulay 2006 p 54). Infants show similar language acquisition abilities despite cultural or regional differences because of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that Chomsky believed help facilitate language learning. Children do not learn language simply through imitation, but through a more complex process that is innately conducted cognitively. Thus, language acquisition is rapid because of these innate structures already in place (Macaulay 2006). Chomsky's theory takes an interesting twist when applied to children of deaf populations. One study (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander 1998), explored the language structures used by deaf children in the United States and in China. What the research discovered was that the compilation of language structures in hand-made gestures was incredibly similar, despite vast cultural and language differences. According to this study, "These striking similarities offer critical empirical input towards resolving the ongoing debate about the innateness of language in human infants," (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander 1998 p 279). This essentially serves as a testament to Chomsky's belief that children hold an innate ability to learn language in specific schemas, and that this ability transcends cultural differences (Spencer & Marschuck 2006). In fact, one of the greatest signs of hearing loss is when children do not talk at the level appropriate to their developmental stage (Mayberry 2002).

ASL (American Language) History and Structure

The most commonly used sign language in the English speaking world is American Sign Language (ASL). Essentially, the practice began with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet in the early nineteenth century. He brought European notions of sign language home to the United States after traveling abroad. It quickly found success in a changing United States that was taking a different approach to deaf education. As it is practiced today, it is a manual language, rather than relying on sounds as the primary vehicle for communication (Marschuck 2001). This means it includes not only hand gestures, but mouthing and other facial expressions as well. It is complex and relies on grammatical and semantic structures, just as any other language would.

Action Taken vs. Untaken

The fact that children need to be exposed to language early on then creates a situation where deaf children can easily acquire knowledge of sign language during the crucial developmental stages where language acquisition is most important; "The primary consequence of childhood deafness is that it blocks the development of spoken language -- both acts of speaking and comprehending," (Mayberry 2002 p 71). The tendency for deaf children to not be exposed to sign language early on fails to build upon their natural LADs, thus creating serious implications later in life in regards to cognitive and social development. Deaf children can start to learn sign language as early as 4 months. It is important to help deaf infants embody their developmental stage's capacity to learn linguistic skills. Here, the research posits that "The most critical language learning occurs in a very short window of time, and research has shown repeatedly that lack of full exposure to language (spoken or otherwise) in this critical period can have devastating and permanent effects," (Malloy 2003 p 2). Therefore, it is important that deaf infants still be exposed to linguistic learning, even if it is through sign language.

America's View of the Deaf