1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  82. Stokoe’s notation, it should be understood, was precisely this, a notation (like phonetic notation) for research purposes, not for ordinary use. (Some of the notations that have been proposed since are enormously complex: notation of a short sign phrase may occupy an entire page.) There has never been, in the ordinary sense, a written form of Sign, and some have doubted whether a written form would be practicable. As Stokoe remarks, ‘the Deaf may well sense that any effort to transcribe in two dimensions a language whose syntax uses the three dimensions of space as well as time would far outweigh the result—if it could be achieved’ (personal communication; see also Stokoe, 1987).

  Very recently, however, a new system of writing Sign—‘SignFont’—has been developed by a group in San Diego (see Newkirk, 1987 and Hutchins et al., 1986). The use of computers makes it possible to give the immense range of signs, their modulations, and many of their ‘intonations,’ a more adequate written form than had previously been thought possible. SignFont tries to indicate the full expressiveness of Sign itself; it is too early to say, however, whether or not it will find favor in the deaf community.

  If SignFont, or some other form of written Sign, were adopted by the deaf, it might lead them to a written literature of their own, and serve to deepen their sense of community and culture. This prospect, interestingly, was perceived by Alexander Graham Bell: ‘Another method of consolidating the deaf and dumb into a distinct class would be to reduce the sign-language to writing, so that the deaf-mutes would have a common literature distinct from the rest of the world.’ But this was seen by him in an entirely negative light, as predisposing towards ‘the formation of a deaf variety of the human race’ (see Bell, 1883).

  His Dictionary was equally original, for the signs were arranged not thematically (e.g. signs for food, signs for animals, etc.) but systematically, according to their parts, and organization, and principles of the language. It showed the lexical structure of the language—the linguistic interrelatedness of a basic three thousand sign ‘words.’

  It required a quiet and immense self-confidence, even obstinacy, to pursue these studies, for almost everyone, hearing and deaf alike, at first regarded Stokoe’s notions as absurd or heretical; his books, when they came out, as worthless or nonsensical. 83

  83. This was equally the case with Bernard Tervoort’s remarkable thesis on Dutch Sign Language, published in Amsterdam in 1952. This important early work was totally ignored at the time.

  This is often the way with works of genius. But within a very few years, because of Stokoe’s works, the entire climate of opinion had been changed, and a revolution—a double revolution—was under way: a scientific revolution, paying attention to sign language, and its cognitive and neural substrates, as no one had ever thought to do before; and a cultural and political revolution.

  The Dictionary of American Sign Language listed three thousand root signs—which might seem to be an extremely limited vocabulary (compared, for instance, with the 600,000 words or so in the Oxford English Dictionary.) And yet, manifestly, Sign is highly expressive, can express essentially anything that a spoken language can. 84Clearly other, additional principles are at work. The great investigator of these other principles—of all that can turn a lexicon into a language—has been Ursula Bellugi and her collaborators at the Salk Institute.

  84. Besides the immense number of grammatical modulations that signs can undergo (there are literally hundreds of these, for example, for the root sign LOOK), the actual vocabulary of Sign is far larger and richer than any existing dictionary represents. Sign languages are evolving almost explosively at this time (this is especially true of the newest ones, like Israeli Sign). There is a continual proliferation of neologisms: some of these represent borrowings from English (or whatever the surrounding spoken language), some are mimetic depictions, some are ad hoc inventions, but most are created by the remarkable range of formal devices available within the language itself. These have been especially studied by Ursula Bellugi and Don Newkirk (see Bellugi and Newkirk, 1981).

  A lexicon embodies all sorts of concepts, but these remain isolated (at the level of ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’) in the absence of a grammar. There has to be a formal system of rules, by which coherent utterances—sentences, propositions—can be generated. (This is not entirely obvious, an intuitive concept, for utterance itself seems so immediate, so seamless, so personal that one might not at first feel it contained, or required, a formal system of rules: this, surely, is one reason why it was native signers, above all, who felt their own language as ‘ undecomposable,’ and regarded Stokoe’s—and later, Bellugi’s efforts with incredulity.)

  The idea of such a formal system, a ‘generative grammar,’ is itself not new. Humboldt spoke of every language as making ‘infinite use of finite means.’ But it is only in the last thirty years that we have been given, by Noam Chomsky, an explicit account of ‘how these finite means are put to infinite use in particular languages’—and an exploration of ‘the deeper properties that define ‘human language’ in general.’ These deeper properties Chomsky calls the ‘deep structure’ of grammar; he sees them as an innate, species-specific characteristic in man, one that is latent in the nervous system until kindled by actual language use. Chomsky visualizes this ‘deep grammar’ as consisting of a vast system of rules (‘many hundreds of rules of different types’), containing a certain fixed general structure, which at times he sees as analogous to the visual cortex, which has all sorts of innate devices for ordering visual perception. 85

  85. Visual images are not mechanical, or passive, like photographic ones; they are, rather, analytical constructions. Elementary feature—detectors—for vertical lines, horizontal lines, angles, etc.—were first described by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. And at a higher level the image must be composed and structured with the aid of what Richard Gregory has called a ‘visual grammar’ (see ‘The Grammar of Vision,’ in Gregory, 1974).

  A question which has been raised by Bellugi and others is whether sign language has the same generative grammar as speech, the same deep neural and grammatical basis. Since the ‘deep structure’ of language, as envisioned by Chomsky, has an essentially abstract or mathematical nature, it could, in principle, be mapped equally well onto the surface structure of a sign language, a touch language, a smell language, whatever. The modality of the language, as such, would not (necessarily) present any problem.

  A more fundamental question, raised above all by Edelman, is whether any innate or rule-bound basis is needed for language development at all; whether the brain⁄mind might not proceed in a quite different fashion, creating the linguistic categories and relationships it needs, as (in Edelman’s terms) it creates perceptual categories, without prior knowledge, in an ‘unlabelled’ world (Edelman, 1990).

  We are, as yet, almost totally ignorant of the neural substrate for such a grammar—but that there is one, and its approximate location, is indicated by the fact that there are aphasias, including Sign aphasias, in which grammatical competence, and this only, is specifically impaired. 86

  86. The question of whether some nonhuman species have language, languages that make ‘infinite use of finite means,’ remains a confused and contentious one. As a neurologist I have been intrigued by descriptions of aphasia in monkeys, which suggest that the neural primordia of language, at least, evolved before man (see Heffner and Heffner, 1988).

  Chimpanzees are unable to speak (their vocal apparatus is geared only for relatively crude sounds), but are able to make signs quite well, to acquire a vocabulary of several hundred signs. In the case of pygmy chimpanzees, indeed, such signs (or ‘symbols’) may be used spontaneously and passed on to other chimps. There is no doubt that these primates can acquire and use and transmit a gestural code. They may also make simple metaphors or creative couplings of signs (this has been observed in many chimps, including Washoe and Nim Chimsky). But does this, properly speaking, constitute a language? In terms of syntactic competence and generative
grammar, it seems doubtful if chimpanzees can be said to have genuine language capacity. (Although Savage-Rumbaugh feels there may be a proto-grammar; see Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986).

  A person who knows a specific language, in Chomsky’s formulation, is one who has control of ‘a grammar that generates…the infinite set of potential deep structures, maps them onto associated surface structures, and determines the semantic and phonetic interpretations of these abstract objects.’ 87

  87. (See Chomsky, 1968, p. 26.) The intellectual history of such a generative, or ‘philosophical’ grammar, and of the concept of ‘innate ideas’ in general, has been fascinatingly discussed by Chomsky—one feels that he needed to discover his own precursors in order to discover himself, his own place in an intellectual tradition; see especially his Cartesian Linguistics and his Beckman lectures, published as Language and Mind. The great era of ‘philosophical grammar’ was in the seventeenth century, and its high point was the Port-Royal Grammar in 1660. Our present linguistics, Chomsky feels, might have arisen then, but its development was aborted by the rise of a shallow empiricism. If the notion of an underlying native propensity is extended from language to thought in general, then the doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ (that is, structures of mind which, when activated, organize the form of experience) may be traced back to Plato, thence to Leibniz and Kant. Some biologists have felt this concept of innateness essential to explain the forms of organic life, most notably the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whom Chomsky quotes in this context (Chomsky, 1968, p. 81):

  Adaptation of the a priori (a type of constructed language) 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 this 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.

  Others see experience not merely as kindling but as creating the forms of perception and categories (see pp. 116-117).

  How does he get (or get control of) such a grammar? How can such a device be acquired by a two-year-old? A child who is certainly not taught grammar explicitly, and who is subject not to exemplary utterances—pieces of grammar—but to the most spontaneous, offhand (and seemingly uninformative) talk of his parents? (Of course, the language of the parents is not ‘uninformative,’ but full of implicit grammar and innumerable, unconscious linguistic hints and adjustments to which the child unconsciously responds. But there is no conscious or explicit transmission of grammar.) It is this which so strikes Chomsky—how the child is able to arrive at so much from so little. 88

  88. Chomsky, 1968, p. 76.

  We cannot avoid being struck by the enormous disparity between knowledge and experience, in the case of language, between the generative grammar that expresses the linguistic competence of the native speaker and the meager and degenerate data [to which he is exposed] on the basis of which he has constructed this grammar for himself.

  The child, then, is not taught grammar; nor does he learn it; he constructs it from the ‘meager and degenerate data’ at his disposal. And this would not be possible were the grammar, or its possibility, not already within him, in some latent form that is waiting to be actualized. There must be, as Chomsky puts it, ‘an innate structure that is rich enough to account for the disparity between experience and knowledge.’

  This innate structure, this latent structure, is not fully developed at birth, nor is it too obvious at the age of eighteen months. But then, suddenly, and in the most dramatic way, the developing child becomes open to language, becomes able to construct a grammar from the utterances of his parents. He shows a spectacular ability, a genius for language, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six months (this period is the same in all neurologically normal human beings, deaf as well as hearing; it is somewhat delayed, along with other developmental landmarks, in the retarded), and then a diminishing capacity, which ends at childhood’s end (roughly at the age of twelve or thirteen). 89

  89. The notion of a ‘critical age’ for acquiring language was introduced by Lenneberg: the hypothesis that if language were not acquired by puberty it would never be acquired thereafter, at least not with real, native-like proficiency (Lenneberg, 1967). Questions of critical age hardly arise with the hearing population, for virtually all the hearing (even the retarded) acquire competent speech in the first five years of life. It is a major problem for the deaf, who may be unable to hear, or at least make any sense out of, their parents’ voices, and who may also be denied any exposure to Sign. There is evidence, indeed, that those who learn Sign late (that is, after the age of five) never acquire the effortless fluency and flawless grammar of those who learn it from the start (especially those who acquire it earliest, from their deaf parents).

  There may be exceptions to this, but they are exceptions. It may be accepted, in general, that the preschool years are crucial for the acquisition of good language, and that indeed, first exposure to language should come as early as possible—and that those born deaf should go to nursery schools where Sign is taught. It might be said that Massieu, at the age of thirteen and nine months, was still within this critical age, but clearly Ildefonso was far beyond this. Their very late acquisition of language could be explained simply by an unusual retention of neuronal plasticity; but a more interesting hypothesis is that the gestural systems (or ‘home signs’) set up by Ildefonso and his brother, or by Massieu and his deaf siblings, could have functioned as a ‘proto-language,’ inaugurating, so to speak, a linguistic competence in the brain, which was only fired to full activity with exposure to genuine sign language many years later. (Itard, the physician-teacher of Victor, the Wild Boy [see pp. 9-10], also postulated a critical period for language acquisition in order to explain his failure to teach Victor speech production and perception.)

  This is, in Lenneberg’s term, the ‘critical period’ for acquiring a first language—the only period when the brain, from scratch, can actualize a complete grammar. The parents play an essential, but only facilitating, role here: language itself develops ‘from within’ at the critical time, and all they do (in Humboldt’s words) is ‘provide the thread along which it will develop of its own accord.’ The process is more like maturation than learning—the innate structure (which Chomsky sometimes calls a Language Acquisition Device, or LAD) grows organically, differentiates, matures, like an embryo.

  Bellugi, speaking of her early work with Roger Brown, singles out the sense of this as constituting, for her, the central wonder of language; she refers to a joint paper describing the process of ‘induction of the latent structure’ of sentences by the child, and its final sentence: ‘The very intricate simultaneous differentiation and integration that constitutes the evolution of the noun—phrase is more reminiscent of the biological development of an embryo than it is of the acquisition of a conditioned reflex.’ The second wonder of her life as a linguist, she says, was to see that this marvelous Organic structure—the intricate embryo of grammar—could exist in a purely visual form, and that it did so in Sign.

  Bellugi has, above all, studied the morphological processes of ASL—the ways in which a sign is changed to express different meanings through grammar and syntax. It was evident that the bare lexicon of the Dictionary of American Sign was only a first step—for a language is not just a lexicon or code. (Indian sign language, so-called, is a mere code—i.e., a collection or vocabulary of signs, the signs themselves having no internal structure and scarcely capable of being modified grammatically.) A genuine language is continually modulated by grammatical and syntactic devices of all sorts. There is an extraordinary richness of such devices in ASL, which serve to amplify the basic vocabulary hugely.

  Thus there are numerous forms of LOOK-AT (‘look-at-me,’ ‘look-at-her,’ ‘look-at-each-of-them,’ etc.), all of which are for
med in distinctive ways: for example, the sign LOOK AT is made with one hand moving away from the signer; but when inflected to mean ‘look at each other’ is made with both hands moving towards each other simultaneously. A remarkable number of inflections are available to denote durational aspects (fig. 1); thus LOOK-AT (a) may be inflected to mean ‘stare’ (b), ‘look at incessantly’ (c), ‘gaze’ (d), ‘watch’ (e), ‘look for a long time’ (f), or ‘look again and again’ (g)-and many other permutations, including combinations of the above. Then there are large numbers of derivational forms, the sign LOOK being varied in specific ways to mean ‘reminisce,’ ‘sightsee,’ ‘look forward to,’ ‘prophesy,’ ‘predict,’ ‘anticipate,’ ‘look around aimlessly,’ ‘browse,’ etc.

  LOOK AT

  STARE

  LOOK AT INCESSANTLY

  GAZE

  WATCH

  (f) LOOK FOR A LONG TIME

  (g) LOOK AGAIN AND AGAIN

  Figure 1. The root sign LOOK-AT may be modified in many ways. These are some of the inflections for the temporal aspects of LOOK-AT; there are many others, for distinctions of degree, manner, number, etc. (Reprinted by permission [with change in notation] from The Signs of Language, E.S. Klima & U. Bellugi. Harvard University Press, 1979.)

  The face may also serve special, linguistic functions in Sign: thus (as Corina, Liddell, and others have shown) specific facial expressions, or, rather ‘behaviors,’ may serve to mark syntactic constructions such as topics, relative clauses, and questions, or function as adverbs or quantifiers. 90