topics: |  psychology | cognitive | sign-linguistics | deaf

Book Review: The battle for sign language and deaf identity

Tells the story of the deaf community and the language of Sign with an eloquence rarely seen in a book that manages to be scholarly, while infusing enough of the personalities of the main characters to make the narrative tick (e.g. Stokoe came to Gallaudet "to teach Chaucer to the deaf"). As eminently readable as MWMHWFAH, it is absolutely un-putdownable, and leaves you with an emotional high. The story revolves around the rise of the sign from the 1750s in Paris, and its spread through the western world until 1880, when the Milan Intl Congress of Educators of the Deaf, in a vote that excluded deaf members, voted for oralism in favour of sign. And then the story of SL resurgence, and with it, the Deaf community itself.

The writing has a breathless quality about it and there is some drama also in trying to find out whether the Gallaudet agitation in the end will succeed or not... I finished it in one through-the-night sitting. - AM Oct 2005

Excerpts

Wild boy of Averon

Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, was first seen in 1799 going on all fours, eating acorns in the woods, leading an animals life. When he was brought to Paris in 1800, he aroused enormous philosophical and pedagogical interest: How did he think? Could he be educated? The physician Jean-Marc Itard, also notable for his understanding (and misunderstanding) of the deaf, took the boy into his house and tried to teach him language and educate him. Itard's memoirs (1807... engl. 1932): the boy was admitted to the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes - under supervision of Abbe' Roch-Ambroise Sicard - founding member of Society of Observers of Man.

    By studying a creature of this sort, just as they had previously
    studied savages and primates, Red Indians and orangutans, the
    intellectuals of the late 18th c hoped to decide what was
    characteristic of Man. [Jonathan Miller, 1976]

The W.B. of Av challenged the notion that all inequality, misery,
guilt, all constraint - as consequences of civilization (Rousseau and
others) - and that freedom could be found only in Nature "Man is born
free, but is everywhere in chains."  The horrifying reality of Victor
was something of a corrective to this:

    there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture.  Men
    without culture would not be ... the nature's noblemen of Enlightenment
    primitivism... They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few
    useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect:
    mental basket cases [Clifford Geertz, 1973, p. 49]

Impairments and recovery

S. African poet and novelist David Wright:  Lost hearing at
   age 7 - already had the essentials of language - could "hear" his
   mother and the soughing of the wind on the branches.  However,
   once, an inspired cousin whom he could hear "covered his mouth with
   his hand as he spoke.  Silence! Once and for all I understood that
   when I could not see I could not hear." p.5-6

A patient described by Richard Gregory 1974 - contgenitally blind -
was given his sight by an operation.  Immediately he could read the
time from the clock - previously he had been used to feeling the hands
of a watch.  Was able to make instant "transmodal" transfer. [6]

David Wright, Deafness, 1969:
Encountered sign first when he was sent to the Northampton School in
England, founded following the Clarke School for the Deaf in
Northampton Mass, 1867, which followed an oralist approach.

  Confusion stuns the eye, arms whirl like windmills in a hurricane
 ... the emphatic silent vocabulary of the body -- look, expression,
  bearing, glance of eye; hands perform their pantomime.  Absolutely
  engrossing pandemonium.... I began to sort out what's going on.  The
  seemingly CORYBANTIC brandishing of hands and arms reduces itself to
  a convention, a code which as yet conveys nothing.  It is in fact a
  kind of vernacular.  The school has evolved its own peculiar
  language or argot, though not a verbal one.... All communications
  were supposed to be oral. Our sign-argot was of course prohibited
  ... But these rules could not be enforced without the presence of the
  staff.  

  What I have been describing in not how we talked, but how we
  talked among ourselves when no hearing person was present.  At such
  times our behaviour and conversation were quite different.  We
  relaxed inhibitions, wore no masks. - p.13


corybantic: to do with music and ecstatic dance 

Abbe Sicard and Abbe l'Epee

	[the traditional approach to the deaf was to have them learn to
	 "oralize".  The genesis of the  idea of Sign Language as a medium
	 of instruction and communication. ]


Abbe Sicard, pioneered the idea of deaf education through signs

Abbe Sicard, student of Abbe L'Eppe: "The deaf person has no
     symbols for fixing and combining ideas." [see d'Estrella below]

[Sacks calls Sicard a grammarian of SL, but this may not be strictly
true].
Aristotle: symbols had to be speech.

goes back to bible perhaps - subhuman status of mutes is part of the
Mosaic Code.
But some, such as Socrates, thought otherwise:

If we had neither voice nor tongue, and yet wished to manifest things
to one another, should we not, like those which are at present mute,
endeavour to signify our meaning by the hands, head, and other parts
of the body? - remark by Socrates in Plato, Cratylus [15]

Abbe de l'Ep\'ee: partly wanted souls of the deaf to have access to the
	Scriptures and not die unsalvaged - and partly because of a
	philosophical and linguistic idea - paid minute attention to
	the indigenous sign language of the poor deaf who roamed Paris
	- and acquired their language (possibly one of the first to do
	so) - and then by associating signs with pictures and written
	words, taught them to read - and with this, in one swoop,
	opened to them the world's learning and culture.  17

Opened a school in 1755 - obtained public support - by 1789 had
	trained teachers who opened 21 schools for the deaf in France
	and across Europe.  Published book in 1776 - revolutionized
	deaf education.  During revolution the future of l'Epee's own
	school seemed uncertain - but by 1791 it had become the
	National Institution for Deaf-Mutes.

One of the first deafs to write - Pierre Desloges - (recovered from
obscurity in The Deaf Experience by Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip):

  As long as I lived apart from other deaf people... I used only
  scattered, isolated, and unconnected signs.  I did not know the art
  of combining them to form distinct pictures with which one can
  represent various ideas, transmit them to one's peers, and converse
  in logical discourse.

the philosopher Condillac, originally thinking of the deaf as
"sentient statues" or "ambulatory machines", attended l'Epee's classes
incognito, became a convert, and first endorsed his SL approach.
Subsequently the public flocked to the demonstrations by l'Epee and
Sicard, leading to a sea change in deaf history - the opening of deaf
schools, usually manned by deaf teachers, their emancipation and
enfranchisement.  21

opposition from Pereire, great "oralizer" and "demutizer" - required
years of dedication - one teacher to one pupil - whereas l'Epee could
educate pupils by the hundred.  25

De L'Epee however, did not believe SL to be a complete language,
capable of expressing every thought, concrete or abstract, as
economically and effectively as speech.  He saw it as having no
grammar and proposed a set of "methodical signs" - which to some
extent retarded deaf education, on which French grammar was
superimposed.  This misapprehension persisted for sixty years, before
Roch-Ambroise B\'ebian, Sicard's pupil, threw out the methodical signs
and the imported grammar. 20

American Asylum for the Deaf: 1817

Rev Thomas Gallaudet was once watching a group of students playing in his
garden, and noticed one of them who was not joining in.  She was Alice
Cogswell, and she was deaf.  Gallaudet talked to her father, the surgeon
Mason Cogswell of Hartsford, about setting up a deaf school.  Then he
sailed to Europe looking for a teacher.  Went first to England, where he
found "oral" schools from the 1700s - was told that the "oral" method was a
secret.

[After meeting Laurent Clerc at a SL demonstration in London], G went to
Paris where he saw Clerc teaching at the Instt Deaf-Mute. LC was a 
student of Massieu, student of Sicard. He agreed to go to the US, and on
the 52 day journey, he taught Gallaudet sign and learned English. They
arrived in US 1816.  Together they set up the American Asylum for the deaf
in Connecticut in 1817 [$5K raised privately, $5K from the Connecticut
legislature].   Soon thereafter, 23K acres of land given in Alabama for
setting up a school for the deaf.]

America was converted 50 years after France.  Spectacular success of the
Hartford Asylum led to other schools - the French signs combined with
indigenous signs to result in an ASL creole by 1867 - and eventually ASL.
However FSL and ASL remain relatively intelligible, unlike BSL, which had
different indigenous origins.


--Earlier indigenous elements in American Sign Language?-- 
				 [this section is an aside, not from the book]

The older deaf community on Martha's Vineyard already had an informal SL --
the hereditary propensity for deaf births is traced to a 1690 emigration
from Kent, where a genetic variety with a propensity for deafness may have
been present. 

Based on this, some Americans have claimed a greater degree of indigenous
content for ASL:

	Though the students used Gallaudet's form of sign language, [G] and
	Clerc noticed that they used another form of sign language
	outside of the classroom. Gallaudet realized that this was there
	"natural language," and it was free of all grammar and shortened
	sentences down to key phrases. This "natural language" later became
	known as American Sign Language.  
		- http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall05/rosen/history.html

Nora Ellen Groce's 1985 book on the Vineyard, Everyone Here Spoke Sign
presents this chart, based on arguments by James Woodward: 

	

However, the powerful role of organized instruction in forming convention
cannot be denied.  It is clear to any observer today that ASL and FSL are
rather close, with more than half the vocabulary is signed in the same way.
Woodward however, argues that the significant differences between FSL and
ASL may be due to earlier, local influences.

also see: 
http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/evolutionofsignlanguage.htm

--Gallaudet University-- 

Gallaudet Univ (originally Columbia Instn for the Deaf and Blind in
Wash DC) founded 1864 by law of Congress.

Roch Instt of Tech (RIT) - more than 1500 students forming the Natl
Tech Instt for Deaf.

Deaf Separatism: 1831 Edmund Booth - wanted to form a deaf township or
community; 1856 John James Flournoy - deaf state "out west".

The generous mood continued till 1870 - but after that, in twenty
years the tide turned against the use of Sign by and for the deaf.
Debates of the 1870's: Shouldn't Sign impede the interaction of the
deaf with the general hearing populace?  Among the champions for this
movement, Alexander Graham Bell - family of teaching elocution and
correcting speech impediments - both his mother and wife were deaf
but never acknowledged this.  He himself could sign fluently, and said
on one occasion that

   if we have the mental condition of the [deaf] child alone in view
   without ref to lg, no language will reach the mind like the language of
   signs. 28

Edward Gallaudet (son of Thomas) toured schools in Europe in late
1860s - visited deaf schools in fourteen countries - found that SL
schools did as well as oral schools in speech articulation, but did
far better in general education.

Intl Congress of Educators of the Deaf - Milan 1880 - excluded deaf
teachers from the vote - oralism won and use of Sign in schools was
officially proscribed.

Therefore, hearing teachers were needed.
Percentage of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was 50% in 1850, fell
to 25% by 1900s, and 12% by 1960. 28

Resulting devaluation of SL: Helmer Myklebust, The Psychology of Deafness,
  1960: The manual sign language used by the deaf is an ideographic
  language.  Essentially it is more pictorial, less symbolic, and as a
  system is one which falls mainly at the level of imagery.  Ideographic
  language systems, in comparison with verbal symbol systems, lack
  precision, subtlety and flexibility.  It is likely that Man cannot
  achieve his ultimate potential through an Ideographic lg, inasmuch as it
  is limited to the more concrete aspects of experience. 76

1960S: Fighting for sign language in deaf education

Hans Furth - psuchologist working on deaf cognition: so much time is spent
     in teaching the deaf speech, that very little is left for culture,
     etc.  And also, they suffer from "information deprivation" - no
     opportunity for them to acquire from buzz.

In 1960s and 1970s tide turned.
Joanne Greenberg's novel In this Sign (1970), more recent Mark Medoff's
play and movie: Children of a Lesser God. 29

Still prevailing confusion: seduction of compromise - combining sign
and speech, e.g. "Signed English". 30

language must be introduced and acquired as early as possible or its
development may be permanently retarded and impaired... Therefore
deafness must be diagnosed as early as possible. 31 [but not easy in
the first year - needs a relatively simple test - measure the auditory
evoked potentials in the brainstem).

There is no evidence that signing impedes the learning of speech,
indeed the opposite may be the case. 32

Where everyone speaks sign

Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: 
Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard."

Through a recessive gene brought out by inbreeding, a form of hereditary
deafness persisted for 250 years on Martha's Vineyard, MA, following the
arrival of deaf settlers in 1690s.  Some villages (Chilmark, West Tisbury)
deafness was one in four.    [Birth rate of deaf in MV was 1:155, whereas
it was 1:2730 in rest of the US.]

So the entire community learned Sign, and being deaf was not seen as being
"handicapped".  The deaf were educated at Hartford Asylum and were often
better educated and more sagacious than their neighbours.  In interviews by
Groce, deafness was not a factor often considered even.  ("Now you come to
mention it, yes, Ebenezer was deaf and dumb.")

Martha's Vineyard may not be that rare.  An isolated village in the
Yucatan has 13 adults+ 1 baby  congenitally deaf among 400 people -
and everyone speaks Sign.  They use a Mayan Sign that is clearly of
some antiquity - and is being studied - Robert Johnson and Jane Norman
of Gallaudet U.

[Sacks visits W Tisbury, MA]: A 90-year old lady, sharp as a pin,
sometimes falls into a reverie.  But her hands in constant complex
motion - as if knitting.  Her daughter explained - she wasn't
sleeping, but just thinking to herself - thinking in Sign.  Even in
sleep she may sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane - she was
dreaming in Sign.  p.36

[Sacks meets Joseph at the Braefield School for the Deaf - not detected till
age four.  Had no language even at age 11.  Good visual intelligence.]

Joseph  longed to communicate.  He looked alive and animated, his eyes
attracted to speaking mouths and signing hands - uncomprehendingly, and it
seemed to me, yearningly. ... His distress at leaving school was painful to
see, for going home meant, for him, return to the silence...

Joseph was unable, e.g. to communicate how he had spent the weekend -- one
could not really ask him, even in Sign: he could not even grasp the idea
of a q, much less formulate an answer.  It was not only language that was
missing: there was not, it was evident, a clear sense of the past, of "a
day ago" as distinct from "a year ago."   There was a strange lack of
historical sense [40]

Theophilus d'Estrella

Theophilus d'Estrella: gifted
deaf artist and photographer, born deaf, did not start to acquire any
formal SL till age 9 - but had devised a fluent "home-sign" system.
[William James 1893] quotes him from a letter:

  I thought in pictures and signs before I came to school.  The pictures
  were not exact in detail, but were general.  They were momentary and
  fleeting in my mind's eye.  The [home] signs were not extensive but
  somewhat conventional [pictorial] after the Mexican style... not at all
  like the symbols of the deaf and dumb language.

Language-less though he was, d'Estrella was clearly inquisitive and
imaginative as a child - he thinks the briny sea is the urine of a great
Sea-God, and the moon is a goddess in the sky.  All this he was able to
relate when, in his tenth year, he started at the California School for the
Deaf, and learned to sign and write.  D'Estrella considered that he did
think, that he thought widely, albeit in images and pictures, before he
acquired formal language. James comments: "His narrative tends to
discontenance the notion that no abstract thought is possible without
words.  Abstract thought of a decidedly subtle kind, both scientific and
moral, went on here in advance of the means of expressing it to others."
[41]

[AM: While his recollections may have been coloured by later
experience (see St. Augustine myth below), it is true that learning lg
to such a degree at the age of nine already speaks of some mental
apparatus for conceptualization.  Must have had very diligent
parenting at the very least. ]

"Infant" etymology: non-speaking

Luria and F.Ia.Yudovich, 1968: Identical twins with language retardation
due to cerebral problems.  Improved when separated - and after 3 months,
when brought together, whole structure of their mental life had
changed... we observed 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."

The very word "infant" means non-speaking. 42

from L. infantem (nom. infans) "young child, babe in arms," noun use
    of adj. meaning "not able to speak," from in- "not" + fans, prp. of fari
    "speak" (see fame).
    FANS: (cf. Skt. bhanati "speaks;" L. fari "to say;" Arm. ban, bay
    "word, term;" O.C.S. bajati "to talk, tell;" O.E. boian "to boast," ben
    "prayer, request;" Gk. pheme "talk," phone "voice, sound," phanai "to
    speak;" O.Ir. bann "law"). The goddess Fama was the personification of
    rumor in Roman mythology.

Jean Massieu

Jean Massieu, student of Abbe Sicard, teacher of Laurent Clerc:
Language-less until the age of 14, achieved spectacular success becoming
eloquent both in Sign and written French.  Grew up in farm with eight
siblings, five of whom were deaf:

  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 ... 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. 44

Massieu 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, in his book about Massieu, describes how he started by drawing
pictures of objects and asking Massieu to do the same.  Then, to introduce
M to lg, 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." 47

Sicard gives marvelous descriptions of how they took walks together, with
Massieu demanding and noting the names for everything:

  We visited an orchard to name all the fruits.  We went into a woods to
  distinguish the oak from the elm ... the willow from the poplar,
  eventually all the other inhabitants... He didn't have enough tablets and
  pencils for all the names with which I filled his dictionary, and his
  soul seemed to expand and grow with these innumerable
  denominations... Massieu's visits were those of a landowner seeing his
  rich domain for the first time.

Adam - learned names of all objects in creation - why? Why do they make
them his "domain"? Giving names is also generalizing - for "oak" denotes
the entire class of oak trees.

[AM: Disagree with this discourse: Perhaps at least some of this type of
     concrete category generalizations exist pre-linguistically. ]

Vygotsky

L.S. Vygotsky [psychologist, born Byelorussia 1896, d. age 38, widely
influential - Luria says meeting V was the most crucial event of his life,
Piaget praises his originality]. His "Thought and Language",
publ. posthumously 1934, was banned as "anti-Marxist," "anti-Pavlovian,".

  A word does not refer to a single object but to a group or class of
  objects.  Each word is therefore already a generalization.
  Generalization is a verbal act of thought and reflects reality in quite
  another way than sensation and perception reflect it.  [Thought and Lg,
  1962 (1934) p.5] 48

Vygotsky: [We start with dialogue, with language that is external and
social, but then to think, to become ourselves, we have to move to a
monologue, to inner speech.]

  Inner speech is speech almost without words ... it is not the interior
  aspect of external speech, it is a function in itself... While in
  external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die
  as they bring forth thought.  Inner speech is to a large extent thinking
  in pure meanings.  [Inner speech is as unknown to science] as the other
  side of the moon... 73

Sicard: Massieu did not wait for the adjectives, but made use of names of
objects in which he found the salient quality he wanted to affirm of
another object ... To express the swiftness of one of his comrades in a
race, he said, "Albert is a bird"; to express strength, he said, "Paul is
a lion"; for gentleness ihe said, "Deslyons is lamb." p.49

[clearly, a Lakoff-ian evocation of metaphor!]

Pronouns also gave peculiar problems.  "He" was at first mistaken for a
proper name; "I" and "you" were confused (as often happens with toddlers).
Abstractions were difficult - eg. the idea of a square - and this last
particularly excited Sicard: "Massieu understands abstractions! He is a
human creature." 51

Isolated children and language

KASPAR HAUSER: Anselm von Feuerbach, 1832, "KH: An account of an individual
kept in a dungeon, separated from all communication with the world, from
early childhood to about the age of seventeen."  Abandoned by his mother to
a family with ten children, he was kept in the cellar, and would be given
opium and be changed etc. in his sleep.  He was discovered one day in 1828,
in Nuremberg, with a letter saying something of his history.  When he "came
into the world" (an expression he often used), he first realized that
"there existed men and other creatures."  However, within several months,
he had started to acquire language.  This awakening to human contact, to
lg, led to a sudden and brilliant awakening of his whole mind and soul.
Everything excited his wonder and joy - there was a boundless curiosity and
incandescent interest in everything, a "love affair with the world".
Initially his memory seemed all for particulars and he seemed incabaple of
abstract thought, but eventually with language he acquired this also. 53

ILDEFONSO: born on farm in S. Mexico, he and a congenitally deaf brother
were only deaf members of his family and community - no
schooling or contact with Sign. Discovered by Susan Schaller, SL
interpreter and scholar, at age 27.  Seemed alert and alive, and yearning
and searching.  Like Joseph, very observant ("he watches everything and
everyone").  When Schaller signed "Your name?", he simply copied the sign;
this was all he could do - had no comprehension that it was a sign.
And then quite suddenly, one day he had a breakthrough with numbers.  All
at once, he grasped what they were, how to operate with them, their sense;
and this caused an intellectual explosion.  Real breakthrough on day six -
after hundreds of repetitions, particularly the sign for "cat" - suddenly it
became a sign pregnant with meaning, that could be used to symbolize a
meaning:

   His face stretches and opens with excitement... slowly at first, then
   hungrily, he sucks in everything, as though he had never seen it before:
   the door, the bulletin board, chairs tables, students, the clock, the
   green blackboard, and me... He has entered the universe of humanity, he
   has discovere the communion of minds.  He now knows that he and a cat
   and the table have names.

Schaller compares Ildefonso's "cat" with Helen Keller's "water" - the first
word, the first sign, that leads to all others, tht opens the imprisoned
mind and intelligence.

But as with Kaspar Hauser, striking problems remained: in particular, as
Schaller notes, "time concepts seemed impossible for him to grasp, units of
time, tenses, temporal relationships, and just the idea of measuring time
as events -- took months to teach," 56

Isabelle Rapin, 1979: remarkable linguistic deficiency in [deaf] children -
  Asking questions.  I once asked a boy, "Who lives in your house?" -
  transl into Sign by his teacher.  But the boy had a blank look.  Then the
  teacher turned the q into a series of declarative sentences: "In your
  house, you, mother..."  A look of comprehension came onto his face and he
  drew me a picture of his house with all family members, including the
  dog.  I noted again and again that teachers tended to hestitate to put
  q's to their pupils, and often expressed queries as ... fill in the
  blanks.

Day schools for the deaf seem to be doing poorly compared to residential
schools. [58]

St.Augustine on Learning language

St. Augustine's description of his language learning is a beautiful myth:
  When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards
  something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the
  sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.  Their intention was
  shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all
  peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement
  of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice with expreses our state
  of mind in seeking, haing, rejecting, or avoiding something.  Thus, as I
  heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences,
  I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I
  had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own
  desires. - Confessions I:8

Wittgenstein remarks:
  Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came
  into a strange country and did not understand the language of
  the country; that is, as if it already had a lg, only not this one.  Or
  again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak.  And
  'think' would here mean something like "talk to itself."
  (Phil. Investigations; 32) 60

A terrible power, it would seem, lies with the mother - to introduce
probing questions such as "How?" "Why?" and "What if?" or replace them with
mindles monologue of "What's this?" "Do that"... 65 [Probably
over-emphasized, see descr of Charlotte's parents, who started with Signed
Exact English, before eventually moving to ASL, p.71-73 ]

Signs as Language : William Stokoe

There was no linguistic or scientific attention given to SL until the late
1950s when William Stokoe, a young Medievalist and linguist, found his way
to Gallaudet College.  Stokoe thought he had come to teach Chaucer to the
deaf; but he very soon perceived that he had been thrown, by good fortune
or chance, into one of the world's most extraordinary linguistic
environments. SL, at this time, was not seen as a proper lg, but as a sort
of pantomime or gestural code, or perhaps a sort of broken English on the
hands.  It was Stokoe's genius to see, and prove, that it was nothing of
the sort; that it satisfied every linguistic criterion of a genuine lg, in
its lexicon and syntax, its capacity to generate an infinite number of
propositions.  

In 1960 Stokoe published SL Structure, and in 1965 (with his
deaf colleagues Dorothy Casterline and Carl Cronenberg) A dictionary of
American Sign Lg.  Stokoe was convinced that signs were not pictures, but
complex abstract symbols with a complex inner structure.  He was the first,
then, to look for a structure, to analyze and dissect them, to search for
constituent parts.  Very early he proposed that each sign had at least
three independent parts -- location, handshape, and movement (analogous to
the phonemes of speech) -- and that each part had a limited number of
combinations.

In SL Structure he delineated nineteen diff handshapes,
twelve locations, and twenty-four types of movements, and invented a
notation for these.  The Dict of ASL listed three thousand root signs.

Sign Language Grammar

Ursula Bellugi and colleagues at Salk Institute.

Humboldt spoke of every language as making "infinite use of finite means." 80

Adaptation of the a priori to the real world has no more originated from
"experience" than adaptation of the fin of the fish to the properties of
water.  Just as the form of the fin is given a priori, prior to any
individual negotiation of the young fish with the water, and just as it is
this form that makes possible the negotiation, so it is also the case with
our forms of perception and categories in their relationship to our
negotiation with the real external world through experience. Chomsky 68, p.81

LOOK-AT: hand moving away from signer, but
LOOK-AT-EACH-OTHER: both hands moving towards each other
Can take INFLECTIONS: a) stare, b) look at incessantly, c) gaze, d) watch,
   e) look for a long time, f) look again and again, See figures in book,
   p.86), look-all-over, look-across-a-series, look-at-internal-features
   (p. 91)
["Inflection: change in grammatical function" - are these
   just "grammatical" functions? ]
DERIVATIONAL forms: LOOK ==> reminisce, sightsee, look-forward-to,
   prophesy, predict, anticipate, look-around-aimlessly, browse, etc.

FACE serves linguistic functions [David Corina and others] mark syntactic
constructs such as topics, relative clauses or questions, or function as
adverbs or quantifiers [AM: Why not semantic constructs] 85

Stokoe had thought that there was a single sign for "sit" and "chair" - but
Ted Supalla (himself deaf) and Elissa Newport have shown that these signs
are subtly but crucially separate. 88

Liddell and Johnson (in press): rich dynamic modulation - not only space,
but also time. Sequentiality - "movements" and "holds" akind to music. 88

Stokoe 1979, Language in four dimensions: In a signed lg, narrative is no
  longer linear and prosaic.  Instead, the essence of sign language is to
  cut from a normal view to a close-up to a distant shot to a close-up
  again, and so on, even including flashback and flash-forward scenes,
  exactly as a movie editor works... Not only is signing itself arranged
  more like edited film than like written narration, but also each signer
  is placed very much as a camera: the field of vision and angle of view
  are directed but variable.  Not only the signer signing but also the
  signer watching is aware at all times of the signer's visual orientation
  to what is being signer about.

  Thus, when 3 or 4 signers are standing in a natural arrangement for sign
  conversation... the space transforms are by no means 180 degree rotations
  of the 3D visual world but involve orientations that non-signers seldom
  if ever understand.  When all the transforms of this and other kinds are
  made between the signer's visual 3D field and that of each watcher, the
  signer has transmitted the content of his or her world of thought to the
  watcher.

Neurology of sign as a language

Helen Neville: Sign is read more rapidly and accurately when presented in
the Right Visual field (left hemisphere) 93

APHASIA: Lesions to left-brain do not affect gesturres (wave
goodbye, brandishing a fist, shrug shoulders), but Sign is lost.  Signers
show the same cerebral lateralization as speakers. 94

Brenda I, subject in expts by Bellugi: profound Right hemisphere lesion -
neglects left side of space - when she describes a room, puts everything,
higgledy-piggledy, on right side.  But signing, she uses both halves of the
space.  (fig. p.96, [Polzner/Klima/Bellugi:78]: What the hands reveal about
the brain)

Visual intelligence:  On tests of spatial organization -- the ability to
perceive a whole from disorganized parts - Deaf four-year olds often
outperform hearing high school students.  (Fig. on p. 99 on recognition of
chinese pseudo-character).

Deaf signers show greater speed of reaction to movements in the peripheral
visual field (mostly the watcher is looking at the face, while hands are
signing) ==> increased evoked potentials in the occipetal lobes - primary
areas for vision - not observed in any hearing subjects [Neville] 101

evoked potentials spread forward into the left temporal lobe, normally
viewed as auditory in function ==> suggests that areas that are normally
auditory are being re-allocated for visual processing ==> PLASTICITY. 103

David Wright: I do not notice more, but notice differently.  What I do
  notice, and notice acutely because I have to, because for me it makes up
  almost the whole of the data necessary for the interpretation and
  diagnosis of events, is movement where objects are concerned; and in the
  case of animals and human beings, stance, expression, walk, and
  gesture... [Just] as somebody waiting impatiently for a friend to finish
  a telephone converation knows when it is about to end by the words said
  and the intonation of the voice, so does a deaf man -- like a person
  queuing outside a glass-panelled call-box -- judge the moment when
  good-byes are being said or the intention formed to replace the receiver.
  He notices a shift of the hand cradling the instrument, a change of
  stance, the head drawing a fraction of a millimetre from the earphone, a
  slight shuffling of the feet, and that alteration of expression which
  signals a decision taken.  Cut off from auditory cues he learns to read
  the faintest visual evidence. [DW 1969, p.112] 102

Left brain and language

Elkhonon Goldberg - Enlarges the domain of language to one of "(habituated)
   descriptive systems" in general.  Includes adept musicians, e.g. - expts
   such as lesions (Luria) and dichotic listening show that while musical
   perception is predominantly a RH function for most naive listeners, it
   becomes a LH function in professional musicians and "expert" listeners.


w: His work on hemispheric specialization culminated in the
   "novelty-routinization" theory positing that the two cerebral
   hemispheres are differentially involved in processing novel information
   (the right hemisphere) and processing in terms of well established
   cognitive routines (the left hemisphere). The novelty-routinization
   theory incorporates the more traditional distinction between verbal and
   nonverbal functions as a special case, but is more dynamic in nature,
   allows for evolutionary continuities, and provides a neurodevelopmental
   framework.

Language experience can alter cerebral development : expts by Neville - only
those congenitally deaf subjects who had perfect English grammar showed
"normal" left hemisphere specialization.  The majority do not exhibit this
degree of lateralization, and also appear to lack full grammatical
competence. 109-110

Universality of SL: James Paul Gee and Wendy Goodhart: [1988]: when deaf
children are exposed to signed forms of English - but not ASL - "they tend
to innovate ASL-like forms with little or no input in that lg" 111

Elissa Newport and Sam Supalla (bro of Ted Supalla, also deaf): deaf
  children exposed only to signed English (grammatical functions like topic
  are sequential) replace these grammatical devices by purely spatial
  ones as in ASL or other natural SLs.

Signed English is a strain:
Bellugi: Deaf people have reported to us that while they can process each
item as it appears, they find it difficult to process the message content
as a whole when all the information is expressed in the sign stream as
sequential elements. [Bellugi 80]

These difficulties may be due to fundamental neurological limitations - of
short term memory and cog processing.

	"Fortunately, being children, and still at a "Chomskian" age, they
	are able to create their own linguistic structures, their own
	spatial grammar.  They resort to doing this in order to ensure
	their own linguistic survival. 113

Sign Language: Shared grammaticality

A monolingual American would be lost in rural Japan. But a deaf American
can make contact relatively swiftly with his signing brothers in Japan,
Russia, or Peru -- he would hardly be lost at all.  Signers (esp native
signers) are adept at picking up, or at least understanding, other SLs, in
a way which one would never find among speakers... Some understanding will
usually be established within minutes, accomplished mostly by gesture and
mime (in which signers are extraordinarily proficient).  By the end of teh
day, a grammarless pidgin will be established.  And within three weeks,
perhaps, the signer will possess a very reasonable knowledge of the other
SL, enough to allow detailed discussion on quite complex issues.  There was
an impressive example of this in Aug 1988, when the National Theater of the
Deaf visited Tokyo, and joined the Japan Theater of the Deaf in a joint
production.  "The deaf actors in the American and Japanese acting companies
were soon chatting, and by late afternoon during one recent rehearsal it
became clear they were already on each others' wavelengths." David E Sanger
in the NYT, Aug 29, 88.

Sign language and space

Deaf Signers create elaborate spatial descriptions.  Accounts are
extraoridinary and although anecdotal, demand close attention:

  Charlotte's mother: "All the characters or creatures or objects Charlotte
  talks about are placed.... When Charlotte signs, the whole scene is set
  up; you can see where everyone or everything is; it is all visualized
  with a detail that would be rare for the hearing." [74]

  Bellugi (who normally is rigorously scientific): A visiting deaf friend
  telling us about his recent move to new quarters.  For five minutes or
  so, he described the garden cottage in which he now lived -- rooms,
  layout, furniture, windows, landscaping, and so forth.  He described it
  in exquisite detail, and with such explicit signing that we felt he had
  sculpted the entire cottage, garden, hills, trees, and all in front of
  us. [What the hands reveal about the brain, Poizner etal 87] [107]

What is related here is difficult for the rest of us to imagine; it has to
be seen.  107

Deaf signers as alien learners

The unspeakable experiment of King Psammetichos (7th c BC Egypt, descr
by Herodotus.  Akbar, and also James IV of Scotland, repeated some
version of this):
     Had two children raised by shepherds who never spoke to them, in order
     to see what (if any) language they would speak naturally - is
     repeated, potentially, with all children born deaf.  A small number -
     perhaps ten percent - are born of deaf parents, and exposed to Sign
     from the start, and become native signers.  The rest must live in an
     aural-oral world neither biologically, nor emotionally well equipped
     to deal with them.

Jerome Schein 84: "Most deaf children grow up like strangers in their own
     households."  117

Shanny Mow, autobiography: You are left out of the dinner table
  conversation.  While everyone else is talking and laughing, you are as
  far away as a lone Arab on a desert that stretches along every
  horizon... You thirst for connection.  You suffocate inside but you
  cannot tell anyone of this horrible feeling.  You do not know how to.
  You get the impression nobody understands or cares... You are not granted
  even the illusion of participation.

Chomsky: "Humboldt introduced a further distinction between the form of a
language and what he calls its 'character' ... the way in which language is used, to
be distinguished from its syntactic and semantic structure, which are
matters of form, not use."
[AM: where does semantic structure end?]
There is a certain danger, (as H pointed out) that in examining more and
more deeply the form of a lg, one may actually forget that it has a
meaning, character, a use.  Language is not just a formal device...

One can have or imagine disembodies speech, but one cannot have disembodied
sign.  The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are
continually expressed in the act of signing. 119

Klima and Bellugi: Deaf people are acutely aware of the undertones and
  overtones of iconicity in their vocabulary... deaf signers often extend,
  enhance, or exaggerate mimetic properties.  Manipulation of the iconic
  aspect of signs also occurs in special heightened uses of language (Sign poetry
  and art Sign)... Thus ASL remains a two-faceted language -- formally structured
  and yet in significant aspects mimetically free.

[AM: NOTE usage of word associations from even very fixed MWEs - e.g. he's
so far out that even the Hubble Telescope can't find him - uses a mix (LCP)
of the literal and metaphorical meanings]

EINSTEIN: Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and
erecting a skyscraper in its place.  It is rather like climbing a mountain,
and gaining new and wider views. 123

Some dogs with SL speakers understand sign. 133

Deaf President Now at Gallaudet

Gallaudet University: March 9 1988 - Student's at Gallaudet strike,
demanding a deaf preseident.  In 124 years of history, they have not had a
deaf president.  

After previous president resigned, search committee narrowed to six
candidates - 3 hearing, 3 deaf.  On March 1, three thousand people attended
a rally at Gallaudet to send a message to Board of Trustees that the G
community wanted a deaf president.

On March 5, the night before the selection, a candle-light vigil was held.
Three finalists, two deaf, one hearing. On March 6, the one hearing person
was chosen.  

The Chairman of the board, Jane B Spilman: "The deaf are not yet ready to
function in the hearing world."  

March 7: A thousand students marched to
the hotel where the Board had put up, then the six blocks to the White
House, and to the Capitol. 

March 8: students closed the univ and barricaded the campus.

March 9: faculty and staff support demands of the students: 
1. Deaf president be named 
2. JBSpilman resign 
3. Board have 51% deaf majority -

Deaf president now (DPN)

The Gallaudet University, established 1857 to serve the deaf, had never had
a non-hearing president.

DPN took place over an eight day period between March 6 to March 13,
1988. It is considered a watershed moment that raised awareness of deaf
culture in the dominant hearing culture that surrounds it. On the fourth
day of the protest, Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline interviewed some of the
major actors in the clash. Parallels were drawn between DPN and the
American Civil Rights Movement.


deaf president now: rally March 1988
(image from page on King Jordan,
first deaf president, appointed march 13, 1988).

rallies

Deaf students at Gallaudet began campaigning for a deaf president when Jerry
Lee, who had been president since 1984, resigned in 1987. Students supporting
the selection of a deaf president participated in a large rally on March 1.

Much of the publicty for the rally was financed by Gallaudet alumnus John
Yeh who made the thousands of DPN buttons in yellow and blue.  Many alumni
participated in the events.  To get the rally started, Yeh printed flyers
that read:

    "It's time! In 1842, a Roman Catholic became president of the University
    of Notre Dame. In 1875, a woman became president of Wellesley College. In
    1886, a Jew became president of Yeshiva University. In 1926, a Black
    person became president of Howard University. AND in 1988, the Gallaudet
    University presidency belongs to a DEAF person."

The board of trustees was considering
three finalists: Elisabeth Ann Zinser (hearing) King Jordan,(deaf since
teens), and Harvey Corson (congenitally deaf).  The public support was
largely for Corson.

A candelight vigil was held on March 5. However, on March 6, the board
announced the selection of the sole hearing candidate, Zinser, who had
little experience with deaf education and no sign language skills.

The students responded by shutting down the University.  They barricaded
the campus gates using heavy duty bicycle locks and school buses with the
air let out of their tires. They demanded that:

   * a new deaf president be named
   * That the present chair of the board, who had remarked that "the deaf
      are not yet ready to function in the hearing world", resign
      immediately;
   * that the board of trustees have a majority of deaf members;

The students were supported by the faculty, and also joined by deaf and
hearing supporters from all over the country.  Eventually, Dr. Zinser
resigned on the evening of March 10. On March 11, about 2,500 demonstrators
(only a thousand were Gallaudet students) - marched to the United States
Capitol.

On March 13, at a marathon meeting of the board of trustees, it was
announced that Spilman had resigned, and Philip Bravin (deaf), was the new
chair.  King Jordan, the deaf dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at
Gallaudet, was elected President.

from "deaf and dumb" to "deaf pride"

[This is one of the most uplifting sections of the book, and reveals Sacks
as a truly gifted writer. ]

You keep hearing "you can't, you can't," but I can now.  The words "deaf
and dumb" will be destroyed forever; instead there'll be "deaf and able."
134

* There has been one realm where SL always continued to be used, all over
  the world, despite the changed habits and proscriptions of educators --
  in religious services for the deaf.  Priests and others never forgot the
  souls of their deaf parishioners, learned Sign, and conducted services in
  Sign, right through the endless wrangles over oralism and the eclipse of
  Sign in secular education.

It is perhaps in the church service that the beauty of sign becomes most
evident. Some churches have Sign choirs.  Watching the robed members sign
in unison can be an awe-inspiring experience. [Jerome Schein 1984]

In retrospect, Stokoe's works were seen as "bombshells" and "landmarks",
and they can be seen as having had a major part in leading to the
subsequent transformation of consciousness, they were all but ignored at
the time.  Stokoe:

    Publication in 1960 [of Sign Language Structure] brought a curious local
    reaction. With the exception of Dean Detmold and one or two colleagues,
    the entire Gallaudet College faculty rudely attacked me, linguistics,
    and the study of signing as a language... If the reception of the first
    linguistic study of SL of the deaf community was chilly at home, it was
    cryogenic in a large part of special education -- at that time a closed
    corporation as hostile to SL as it was ignorant of linguistics. 141

Special objection has been made to some of the doctors involved in
Gallaudet's affairs, who tend to see the deaf merely as having diseased
ears and not as whole people adapted to another sensory mode. 151

March 10, Zinser (who had been adamant earlier) resigns, in moving terms -
"this is a very special moment in time, a civil rights moment in history
for deaf people."

March 11: Campus rebounds.  March to Congress. Speeches: Women's univs have
had women prez; black univs have had black prez's - why not deaf?

March 13: King Jordan, postlingually deaf (at 21) - dean of Arts and Sci -
is appointed president [one faction saw this as a compromise - they had
wanted Harvey Corson, supdt of the Louisiana School for the Deaf,
prelingually deaf, native signer.]

Oliver Sacks trivia [w]

Being present at the 1988 Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet shows
Sacks's social side.  More recently, in March 2006, he was one of 263
doctors who published an open letter in The Lancet criticizing American
military doctors who administered or oversaw the force-feeding of
Guantanamo detainees who had committed themselves to hunger strikes.





links:

 http://ifmyhandscouldspeak.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/book-review-seeing-voices-by-oliver-sacks/
       some negative remarks, apparently sacks is off a bit because he
       himself is not part of the deaf culture.  nonetheless, appreciates
       his writing.

Additional Information

[The following biographies and entries are largely synopses from wikipedia and
from references available there, and synopsized for my own reference.]

biography: Abbe de l'Eppe

Abb\'e Charles-Michel de l'Ép\'ee, (1712-1789), "Father of the Deaf", was a
pioneering educator of the deaf in France.

Born to a wealthy family, Epee trained for priesthood, but eventually he
became interested in social work.  In a Paris slum he met two
young deaf sisters who communicated using a sign language. Ép\'ee
recognized the value of signs for the deaf, and founded a shelter for the
deaf which he ran with his own
private income.  In line with emerging philosophical thought of the time,
Ép\'ee came to believe that deaf people were capable of language, and
that they should be able to receive the sacraments and avoid
going to hell.

His original interest at his school was in religious education, but his
attempts to "teach them through the eye what other people acquire through
the ear", led to his development of a kind of "Signed French".  This
form gained sufficient recognition that deaf people could legally use
the language in court.

His Paris school inspired others across Europe.  Mostly, these schools
emphasised learning trades, such as printing, carpentry, masonry, gardening
and tailoring. It was supported by the French government and people in part
as a means to separate deaf people from their families, where they were
poor dependents, and convert them into productive members of society.

At the time, there was already a signing deaf community in Paris, but Epee
viewed their language as primitive.  Instead he developed an idiosyncratic
gestural system using some of this lexicon, combined with other invented
signs to represent all the verb endings, articles, prepositions, and
auxiliary verbs of the French language.

One of his innovations was to open his methods and classrooms to
the public and other educators. He also established teacher-training
programs for foreigners, and invited Thomas Gallaudet to visit his
school.  Students like Laurent Clerc were influential in spreading the
language in America.

Though Ép\'ee is sometimes described as the inventor of Sign Language, he
was more of a promoter of a language that existed well before him, and
which he modified in certain (sometimes arbitrary) ways.

His educational methods introduced the manualism mode of teaching the
deaf.  In many countries, the oralism vs. manualism debate is still raging.

deaf language in India

For example, in India, all government-aided deaf schools use an oralist
approach where children including the profoundly deaf are trained to
articulate sounds that mark them as deficient, instead of the fluid grace
of the sign.


deaf students at jyoti vadhir vidyalaya, kanpur, signing
and oralizing the hindi word hAthi, "elephant".


The situation in India echoes the condition in the West before the 1880
Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan.
This was the meeting at which leading educators of the deaf, mostly hearing
people, were trying to move for an oralist approach, and to ban sign
language from the classroom.  But the strong opposition within the Deaf
(deaf spelt with uppercase D is a culture, not a condition) - led to
greater use of sign language.  Today, SL is viewed as being central to Deaf
identity and attempts to limit its use are viewed as an attack.

who is an "abbe"

Abbe, Abb\'e (from Latin abbas, in turn from Greek abbas, father,
from Aramaic abba) is the French word for abbot. It is the title for
lower-ranking Catholic clergymen in France.

Around 1520, Pope Leo X allowed Francis I and subsequent kings of France to
nominate 255 Abb\'es to head all French abbeys, and to receive an income
from the monastery.

Since the mid-16th century, the title abb\'e has been used for all young
clergymen with or without consecration. Their clothes consisted of black
or dark violet robes with a small collar; they were tonsured.

Since those abb\'es only rarely commanded an abbey, they often worked in
honourable familes as tutors, spiritual directors, etc.; others became
writers.

biography: Thomas Gallaudet

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851) was a pioneer of deaf education in
America.  After graduating from Yale, he trained to become a preacher, but
his life changed after he met Alice Cogswell, the six-year-old deaf
daughter of a neighbor, Dr. Mason Cogswell.  Eventually, Cogswell would ask
Gallaudet to travel to Europe to study methods for teaching deaf students.

In Great Britain he met Abb\'e Sicard, head of the "Institution Nationale
des Sourds-Muets" in Paris, and two of its deaf faculty members, Laurent
Clerc and Jean Massieu.  Gallaudet then visited Paris to study the the
manual communication method. Impressed with it, Gallaudet learned sign
language from Massieu and Clerc, and trained in SL pedagogy.

He then persuaded Laurent Clerc to accompany him, and sailed back to
America. The two men toured New England and successfully raised private and
public funds to found a school for deaf students in Hartford, which later
became known as the American School for the Deaf. Young Alice was one of
the first seven students in the United States. Even some hearing students
came to this school to learn.

His son Edward Miner Gallaudet (1837-1917) founded in 1857 the first college
for the deaf which in 1864 became Gallaudet University.

He died in Hartford in 1851. There is a residence hall named in his honor
at nearby Central CT State University in New Britain, CT.

biography: William Stokoe

William C. Stokoe (pronounced Stokie) (1919-2000) researched American Sign
Language (ASL) at Gallaudet University, and was instrumental in changing
the perception of sign languages from an impoverished set of gestures to
that of a complex and fully functional language.

From 1955 to 1970 Stokoe was professor and chairman of the English
department at Gallaudet. He published Sign Language Structure and
co-authored A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic
Principles (1965). Through these works he was instrumental in changing the
perception of ASL from that of a broken or simplified version of English to
a full natural language with an independent syntax and grammar as
functional and powerful as any spoken language. Because of this, he is
considered a hero in the Deaf community.

Writing system for Sign Languages

Stokoe decomposed signs into sign location, handshape and motion (tab, dez,
and sig), which remain the basic units of SL phonology, but a fatal
omission is any mechanism for representing facial Expression.

Stokoe also devised a written notation for sign language (now called Stokoe
notation). e.g. the written form of the sign for the 'mother' in ASL looks
like U5x. The 'U' indicates that it is signed at the chin, the '5' that is
uses a spread hand (the '5' of ASL), and the 'x' that the thumb touches the
chin. Stokoe to indicate different categories of phonemes in ASL.

While the notation is limited in many ways - the motion phonemes are
deficient, and also there is also no provision for
representing the relationship between signs.  Nonetheless, it is an
important pioneering work for sign analysis at the lexical level.

biography: Laurent Clerc

Laurent Clerc (1785-1869), born in France, has been called "The Apostle of
the Deaf in America" and "The Father of the Deaf".  Trained in sign
language by the Abbe Sicard, he came to America with Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet, and in 1817 they jointly founded the Hartford Asylum where
sign-language instruction first became available in the United States.  It
is now known as The American School for the Deaf and in 1821 moved to its
present site.

At the age of one year, Clerc, fell from a chair onto the ground, and this
incident may have caused his deafness (as well as an inability to smell).
However, Clerc later wrote that he may have been born deaf and without the ability to smell.

Eventually he would apprenticeship with Abbe Sicard, though it was in
America that his fame is the greatest, as the pioneer of sign language.

A town for the deaf?

In 2004, Marvin T. Miller, a deaf journalist, planned the town of Laurent
in South Dakota to be the world's first fully integrated town for sign
language users.  But this project did not materialize.

Some of the opposition was apparently from within the deaf community: 

	... in the complicated political world of deaf culture, Laurent is an
	increasingly contentious idea. For some, like Mr. Miller; his wife,
	Jennifer, who is also deaf; and their four deaf children, it seems
	the simplest of wishes: to live in a place where they are fully
	engaged in day-to-day life. Others, however, particularly advocates
	of technologies that help deaf people use spoken language, wonder
	whether such a town would merely isolate and exclude the deaf more
	than ever.

	"We think there is a greater benefit for people to be part of the
	whole world," said Todd Houston, executive director of the Alexander
	Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in
	Washington. "I understand the desire to be around people like
	ourselves, and I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think
	it's very wise. This is a little bit of circling-the-wagons
	mentality, if you ask me."

	Over the past 15 years, he said, it has become easier for the deaf
	and hard of hearing to grow up using spoken language, because of a
	steady rise in the use of cochlear implants, more early diagnoses and
	therapies for deaf children and efforts to place some deaf children
	in mainstream schools. That fact has set off intense political debate
	over what it means to be deaf and what mode of communication --
	signing or talking -- the deaf should focus on. 

In September 2006, the company proposing the town went bankrupt and
the project closed.