Difficulty of learning sign languages

Many people who have no or minimal experience with sign language users, including (new) parents of deaf children and the professionals who advise them, have fears about the difficulty of learning a sign language. Certainly, they might lack the resources or infrastructure to do so––an important but separate issue. What concerns us here is that they might initially assume they are incapable of learning to sign well enough to be able to help their child's language development. The same paediatric audiologist's website mentioned earlier says, ‘Parents who do not know sign language well cannot provide a rich language environment for their child’.4 With little prior knowledge of signing, parents and professionals are vulnerable to a bias against bringing a sign language into the lives of children who, in fact, could benefit greatly from visual–manual language during a critical time for language and cognitive development.

Certainly, learning a second language as an adult is challenging, but no scholarly study has yet to find that sign languages are more difficult. Motivation is an important component in all second language learning, and parents who find themselves with a deaf child are likely to have strong motivation due to an impulse to communicate with their child in effective ways.

The fear that parents cannot learn to sign well enough to serve as good language models for their children should be put aside: parents do not have to be the most fluent signing models for their children. Deaf children, if exposed to good signing models outside the family, will learn to sign well even if their parents are less than fluent.9 Moreover, deaf children whose parents are able to communicate with them with sign language benefit in other ways: they use more complex language with one another with more positive outcome than those who do not sign at all,10 and they show early language expressiveness on a par with hearing children of the same age.11 With language-learning support (a teacher, tutor, other signers, the child's deaf peers and the parents), family members learning a sign language, for example, ASL or German Sign Language (DGS), at the same time as the deaf child, powerfully enhance family communication and promote a typical language acquisition process, which is key for the child's lifelong success.

Bimodal bilingualism

Sign languages, written representation and orality

Another source of prejudice is based on the persistent misconception that the written form of a language is the superior one, the one worthy of study, and this bias permeates individual and institutional attitudes. Sign languages have historically had no printed form of wide usage; thus, they would be deemed unworthy of study. This logic makes them inferior to spoken language and promotes the idea that they are a ‘last resort’ if the deaf child ‘fails’ at speech.

The disparagement of languages without writing systems is as absurd as it is prejudicial, since literacy takes many forms, print literacy being only one. For example, oral literacy is well researched in Australia, Africa, the Americas, the steppes of Russia and so on. Likewise, orality is not necessary for literacy: story-telling and poetry in sign languages are found around the globe. If one views literacy as strictly being about print, we discard much of what is involved in learning to read, such as world knowledge, comprehension abilities, and understanding narrative form and characterisation.

Sign languages and print literacy

Ample studies have shown that fluency in a natural sign language leads to better print literacy skills in the text of the ambient spoken language (ref. 14, among many on several sign language/spoken language–text pairings). Such studies counter prejudicial perceptions that there is no positive relationship between a sign language and print literacy. If researchers and professionals can stick to identifying and developing factors that promote (or hinder) print literacy without fears about imagined negative effects of sign languages, a discourse of prejudice can be avoided. The development of print literacy is a clear goal of everyone in deaf-related research and professions, and ideological positions that denigrate the contributions of a sign language to the achievement of this goal make children suffer harm from zero tolerance to alternative approaches.

Sign languages and hearing technologies

Hearing children are, quite generally, left to acquire language fairly unencumbered by interventions and heroic concern. When hearing is absent from the child, however, society has reacted during much of history by trying to find ways to restore or insert it, subjecting children to wide-ranging innovations and inventions, procedures and practices, and technologies of hearing, from hearing aids to CIs, in an effort to expose them to speech. Such efforts have proven successful for some, but not for the majority.

For many professionals who do not have expertise in deaf children's language development, scientific data about deaf children's experiences with CI might seem appealing. They place their confidence in technological advances. However, while advances in technologies are largely due to new understandings in technology itself, a CI also requires a sophisticated understanding of the human brain, which we have not yet fully arrived at.

CI outcomes vary, with a significant number of treatment failures.15 More to the point, CI technology varies greatly in its benefit to speech detection and development.16 Furthermore, studies of children with CIs sometimes attribute their variable speech abilities to interference from sign language; yet, that claim is without foundation.3

The issue is that, without sign language, CI treatment failures usually result in significant linguistic deprivation and subsequent lifelong cognitive dysfunction (ref. 17, among many). In contrast, learning a sign language with a similar level of effort as that afforded to deaf children who are training to use a CI guarantees normal language development and promotes cross-language processing.18

The emergence of CI technology has given rise to the re-emergence of prejudiced efforts to exclude sign languages from deaf children's lives. These efforts blame sign languages for limiting the effectiveness and efficiency of implant technology by interfering with the processing of technologically supplied input to the child's brain.

It is instructive to examine one example of a study that claims to offer evidence that signing hinders the acquisition of speech once a child is implanted. Rather than cherry-picking a weak study, we choose a study that has been cited multiple times and in well-respected journals, and show that it does not, in fact, support that claim.

Geers, Spehar and Sedey studied children who had been implanted before age 5 and had been enrolled in a sign and speech setting (called Total Communication) for at least the first 3 years following implantation.19 They found a wide range of results with respect to modes of communication among the children. They concluded children who used speech the most achieved higher auditory speech perception scores and speech intelligibility ratings and demonstrated better use of grammatical English than those who used little to no speech.

What other possible conclusions can be drawn from this study? First, in a Total Communication setting, no children are denied signing. The findings of the study do not, then, suggest that signing interferes with speech development or even that reliance on sign has a negative effect on a child's spoken language skills. Rather, we do not know from this study how much any individual child was using sign language as a means of negotiating speech encounters.

More to the point, since CI technology varies so greatly in benefit to speech detection and development, it is not clear how the Geers, Spehar and Sedey study distinguishes between the variable speech detection of CI users and their variable fluency in sign language in attributing cause to variation in speech use and development. Without clarity in reporting use of either sign language or speech, this is where bias appears in the form of blaming sign languages for effects that the evidence does not support.

Finally, if we suppose that the study's claim is true—and children who use speech the most achieve higher auditory speech perception scores and speech intelligibility ratings and demonstrate better use of grammatical English—we must ask which way the causal arrow points. Geers, Spehar and Sedey interpret this as showing that practising speech leads to better speech perception, and therefore as supporting the advice that sign should not be encouraged. But it might instead show that those with better speech perception find it more rewarding to practise speech, in which case introducing sign would not be contraindicated.

Given that this is one of the most respected studies, it is no surprise that a recent metastudy concludes there is no evidence that signing hinders the acquisition of speech in implanted children.20

Sign language and family relationships

A common fear of parents is that if their deaf children learn sign language, their children will drift away from the family and become part of a social world of deaf signers, a deaf culture. The opposite has been shown to be true. Deaf children who grow up bilingually and are able to communicate with their parents in a sign language (and in a visual modality) are much more likely to have strong, healthy family ties than those deaf people who are unable to speak well or hear well enough to communicate with their parents because neither they nor their parents learned a sign language.21 There are reports indicating that some oral deaf people and hearing parents of deaf children wish they had had an opportunity to learn sign language earlier but were advised against doing so.22 One of the comments to the Post article on DiMarco ended with the bleak statement, ‘I was a victim of oral monolingual education’.

In their social world (or shared culture), deaf people view themselves as whole, well and empowered. In contrast, the medical profession views deaf people as having a medical condition or pathology that they are obligated to address through medical means. Likewise, professions such as audiology and hearing sciences see it as their duty to provide treatments, therapies and interventions. Educators design pedagogy that is special or differentiated from that of other children. This combination of historical negative view of deaf people in society and the professions often communicates to parents that if they allow their deaf children to learn a sign language, their children will identify with this community and not the family. But denying both dimensions of identity (as a signing deaf person and as part of a hearing family) has a greater chance of harm to the deaf child and the family than recognising and integrating both identities and cultures into the family.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing youth who report a preference for both sign language and spoken language experience less stigma associated with being deaf or hard-of-hearing compared with other deaf or hard-of-hearing youth who prefer using solely sign language or spoken language.23 The ability of deaf children to communicate effectively and easily with others is critical to mental health.24 Parents who choose to use spoken language only with their deaf child run a high risk of their child seeking social ties where they can communicate more easily (usually with other deaf adults). Advising parents to avoid signing in order to ensure family relationships is illogical and prejudiced. Hearing parents and deaf children being bilingual in a spoken and a sign language is the most positive, supportive and lasting relationship builder in such families.

There is persistence of thinking about deaf people as having a pathology, whether it is a condition of the ear or a disorder of communication, and there is also insistence on viewing deaf people's bodies as unwell. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a great surge of rethinking about deafness and sign languages with the result that we now recognise that deaf people using a sign language form cohesive and rich linguistic communities much like the linguistic communities of spoken language users. In other words, deaf people are well and have fully constituted ways of being.