ENHS Nature Trails January 2000 Article 2

Natural History and You - The President's Forum
by Nathan Tublitz

The Hand Waving is Over: Sign Language is a True Language

"We [humans] are a spectacular manifestation of life in large part because we have language." From The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas

The biological distinction between humans and the great apes has narrowed in recent years as the mysteries of the human genome are revealed. Yet it goes without saying that our species Homo sapiens is as different from apes as a rose is from a lilac. The classic explanation of our self- exalted status is that humans have developed an incredibly intricate culture which has its basis in that uniquely human trait, language.

Language is that remarkable tool that allows human to communicate an infinite combination of ideas. Because language is the most accessible piece of the mind, it has been studied for millennia as a portal into human thought. Language, however, is separable from thinking; thinking is the ability to have ideas whereas language is the ability to encode ideas into signals used to communicate with another person.

Traditionalist linguists, those academics who study language, have generally insisted that language is inextricably linked to verbalization. In other words, language is produced only by sounds. This has lead to the widely held view that those unable or unwilling to vocalize were incapable of language, an erroneous assumption that has persisted throughout ancient and modern history with a few notable exceptions. Japanese and Chinese cultures each developed the ability to communicate by means of a sign language in which one person watched while the other traced mutually understood characters in his or her palm. A number of indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia and North America also used hand signs to communicate. The best example was the Plains Indians of 19th Century North America. Although their languages were dissimilar, the mode of life and environment of all Plains Indian groups had many shared elements, and, consequently, finding common symbols was easy. Thus, two fingers astride the other index finger represented a person on horseback; two fingers spread and darting from the mouth like the forked tongue of a snake meant lies or treachery; and the gesture of brushing long hair down over the neck and shoulder signified a woman. This sign language became so familiar that long and complex narratives--in monologue or dialogue--could be signed and understood within large groups of Indians otherwise unable to communicate.

Unlike the Plains Indians, western European culture was less kind to the speechless. Those unable to produce intelligible sound by virtue of being deaf or because of a deficiency in their vocal cord apparatus were considered intellectually inferior, isolated from mainstream society, and unfairly tagged with the denigrative appellation of "dumb". The first person to attempt to reverse this negative stereotype was Charles-Michel Abbé de l'Epée, who designed a system in the mid 18th Century for spelling out French words with a manual alphabet and expressing whole concepts with simple signs. A modification of l'Epée's system was brought to the United States in 1816 by Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Conn. The new sign language was combined with the various systems already in use in the United States to form American Sign Language, which today is used by more than 500,000 deaf people in the United States and Canada and is the fourth most common language in the United States.

Although highly complex, ASL has been under constant attack since its inception as not being a true language. Disciples of linguistics, the scientific examination of language, have long maintained that language consists of two main components, grammar and words. Grammar is the formal system by which words are arranged to provide contextual meaning. For example, man bites dog has a very different meaning than dog bites man. The primary units of grammar are words, linguistically defined as an arbitrary association between a sound and a meaning. This narrow definition excludes ASL and other signing systems from inclusion as a true language. But is that a correct conclusion? Recent evidence suggest otherwise.

All commonly used sign languages including ASL have unique signs for specific concepts. These signs, although not verbal utterances, have all the characteristics and subtleties of words used in oral languages. Formal linguistic analysis has demonstrated that the grammatical structure of ASL is as structured, complex and bounded by as many rules as that of many spoken languages. Additional confirmation that sign languages are true languages has come in the past 2 years with the discovery of a group of deaf children in a Nicaraguan orphanage who have spontaneously devised a unique and highly complex sign language - consisting of 1000s of words and a formal grammar - in order to communicate with each other.

Perhaps the best evidence supporting the contention that sign languages are true languages comes from studies by Professor Helen Neville of the Psychology Department at the University of Oregon. Dr. Neville has used a powerful new non- invasive brain imaging procedure known a functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the activity of intact brains in living subjects. There are two major language areas in the brain, Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Both areas are in the left hemisphere and are highly active during processing of oral languages. What Prof. Neville has shown is that the same two areas are also active in deaf people performing ASL. This result confirms that ASL is processed in the same manner as speaking languages.
Sign languages have been much maligned as have those that perform these complex tasks. Perhaps now both will be taken more seriously.

Nathan Tublitz
Professor of Biology
Institute of Neuroscience
University of Oregon
Eugene OR 97403
Phone: 1-541-346-4510 FAX: 1-541-346-4548

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