Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Kirk Alan VanGilder, in “Making sadza with deaf Zimbabwean women: A missiological reorientation of practical theological method toward self-theologizing agency among subaltern communities,” (doctoral dissertation, Boston University, 2011), writes, “Perhaps the most damaging aspect of hearing theological mis-readings of Deaf lives has been the way in which Romans 10:17 has been interpreted. The New Revised Standard Version translates this verse as, ‘So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.’ 248 Traditionally, this verse has been interpreted to mean that Deaf people were incapable of faith due to a lack of the ability to hear what is told in the word of Christ. Many Deaf studies writers have attributed this interpretation to the early Christian theologian Augustine. (9 See John Vickrey van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America [Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989], p. 4.) However, the attribution of this interpretation to Augustine is a misperception based on a misquotation that has been carried through the centuries. As early as 1912, the American Annals of the Deaf published an article explaining how this misquotation occurred in the writings of a Spanish proponent for oral methods of educating deaf children. Augustine’s actual views on deaf people and signed language are actually very positive and commending of its capability as a language of the soul. However incorrect it is to attribute this oralist interpretation of Romans 10:17 to Augustine, it remains a commonly held interpretation in church history and is often bolstered with Augustine’s authoritative. Such readings of scripture have created numerous responses from Christian authorities in the history of deaf education preventing the use of signed languages causing a breach of trust between the church and Deaf people that still exists.”

  136 Education of deaf children by noble families is the subject of Susan Plann, A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550–1835 (1997). A new historical anthology on the subject contains “documents and literature from the fifteenth century to the present”: Benjamin Fraser, editor, Deaf History and Culture in Spain: A Reader of Primary Documents (2009). Additionally, the following article describes the sign language developed in the Ottoman empire: M. Miles, “Signing in the Seraglio: Mutes, dwarves, and gestures at the Ottoman Court 1500–1700,” Disability Handicap and Society 15, no. 1 (2000). General sources on deafness in history include James Roots’s chapter, “Historical overview of the deaf,” in The Politics of Visual Language: Deafness, Language Choice, and Political Socialization (1999); John Vickrey Van Cleve’s anthologies, Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship (1999) and The Deaf History Reader (2007); and The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education, edited by Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (2007).

  137 The history of the deaf in France and the work of the Abbé de l’Épée is the subject of James R. Knowlson, “The idea of gesture as a universal language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 4 (October–December 1965); and Anne T. Quartararo, “The perils of assimilation in modern France: The Deaf community, social status, and educational opportunity, 1815–1870,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1995).

  138 See Phyllis Valentine’s chapter “Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: Benevolent paternalism and the origins of the American Asylum,” in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, edited by John Vickrey Van Cleve (1999), pages 53–73.

  139 For a detailed history of the Deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard, see Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard (1985).

  140 The story of Gallaudet University is told in Brian H. Greenwald and John Vickrey Van Cleve, A Fair Chance in the Race of Life: The Role of Gallaudet University in Deaf History (2010).

  141 Alexander Graham Bell set forth his proposals in “Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race,” a paper presented to the National Academy of Sciences on November 13, 1883, and published in the 1884 Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences; and in “Historical notes concerning the teaching of speech to the deaf,” Association Review 2 (February 1900).

  142 Thomas Edison’s interest in the oralist movement sprang in part from his experience as a hearing-impaired person. Edison served for a time as a member of the Advisory Board of the Volta Bureau, the organization founded by Alexander Graham Bell to promote education in “speech reading, speech and hearing” to the deaf; see John A. Ferrall’s article “Floating on the wings of silence with Beethoven, Kitto, and Edison,” Volta Review 23 (1921), pages 295–96.

  143 Bell and the ascendancy of oralism are discussed in Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (1996); Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture (2005); and John Vickrey Van Cleve, Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship (1999).

  144 The quotation from George Veditz appears in Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988), page 36.

  145 Patrick Boudreault is an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge. All quotations from Boudreault come from my interview with him in 2008 and subsequent communications.

  146 Aristotle’s conclusions about the comparative intelligence of the deaf and the blind were set forth in The History of Animals and On Sense and the Sensible. Aristotle contended that “of persons destitute from birth of either sense, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf and dumb” because “rational discourse is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible.” These quotations occur at Sense and Sensibilia 437a, 3–17, on page 694 of The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by J. Barnes (1984).

  From The History of Animals, book 4, chapter 9: “Viviparous quadrupeds utter vocal sounds of different kinds, but they have no power of converse. In fact, this power, or language, is peculiar to man. For while the capability of talking implies the capability of uttering vocal sounds, the converse does not hold good. Men that are born deaf are in all cases also dumb; that is, they can make vocal sounds, but they cannot speak. Children, just as they have no control over other parts, so have no control, at first, over the tongue; but it is so far imperfect, and only frees and detaches itself by degrees, so that in the interval children for the most part lisp and stutter.”

  From On Sense and the Sensible, section 1, part 1: “The senses which operate through external media, viz. smelling, hearing, seeing, are found in all animals which possess the faculty of locomotion. To all that possess them they are a means of preservation; their final cause being that such creatures may, guided by antecedent perception, both pursue their food, and shun things that are bad or destructive. But in animals which have also intelligence they serve for the attainment of a higher perfection. They bring in tidings of many distinctive qualities of things, from which the knowledge of truth, speculative and practical, is generated in the soul.”

  “Of the two last mentioned, seeing, regarded as a supply for the primary wants of life, and in its direct effects, is the superior sense; but for developing intelligence, and in its indirect consequences, hearing takes the precedence. The faculty of seeing, thanks to the fact that all bodies are coloured, brings tidings of multitudes of distinctive qualities of all sorts; whence it is through this sense especially that we perceive the common sensibles, viz. figure, magnitude, motion, number: while hearing announces only the distinctive qualities of sound, and, to some few animals, those also of voice. Indirectly, however, it is hearing that contributes most to the growth of intelligence. For rational discourse is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible, which it is, not directly, but indirectly; since it is composed of words, and each word is a thought-symbol. Accordingly, of persons destitute from birth of either sense, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf and dumb.”

  Additionally, in The Politics, Aristotle declared, “With regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, l
et there be a law that no cripple child be reared” (page 443 of the 1984 Penguin Books edition).

  147 William Stokoe’s Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf was originally published in 1960 by the University of Buffalo’s Department of Anthropology and Linguistics and was reprinted in the Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 10, no. 1 (Winter 2005).

  148 Hemispheric lateralization and sign language are discussed by Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), pages 93–111; and in Heather P. Knapp and David P. Corina’s chapter, “Cognitive and neural representations of language: Insights from sign languages of the deaf,” in Kristin A. Lindgren et al., Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts (2008), pages 77–89.

  149 The effect of left-hemisphere damage on the ability to produce Sign is the subject of Ursula Bellugi et al., “Language, modality, and the brain,” in Brain Development and Cognition, edited by M. H. Johnson (1993); and Gregory Hickock, Tracy Love-Geffen, and Edward S. Klima, “Role of the left hemisphere in sign language comprehension,” Brain & Language 82, no. 2 (August 2002).

  150 Studies demonstrating that people who learn Sign in adulthood tend to use the visual part of their brain more include Madeleine Keehner and Susan E. Gathercole, “Cognitive adaptations arising from nonnative experience of sign language in hearing adults,” Memory & Cognition 35, no. 4 (June 2007).

  151 The Peter and the Wolf study—J. Feijoo, “Le foetus, Pierre et le Loup”—originally appeared in L’Aube des Sens, edited by E. Herbinet and M. C. Busnel (1981), and was subsequently cited by Marie-Claire Busnel, Carolyn Granier-Deferre, and Jean-Pierre Lecanuet, “Fetal audition,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 662, Developmental Psychobiology (October 1992).

  Japanese acoustics researchers Yoichi Ando and Hiroaki Hattori described babies’ prenatal acclimation to airport noise in “Effects of intense noise during fetal life upon postnatal adaptability,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 47, no. 4, pt. 2 (1970). A follow-up study by Ando and Hattori found a positive correlation of airport noise with low birth weight: “Statistical study on the effects of intense noise during human fetal life,” Journal of Sound & Vibration 27, no. 1 (March 1973); yet another established that airport noise negatively impacts children’s growth: Lawrence M. Schell and Yoichi Ando, “Postnatal growth of children in relation to noise from Osaka International Airport,” Journal of Sound & Vibration 151, no. 3 (December 1991).

  152 Newborn language preferences are discussed in Jacques Mehler et al., “A precursor of language acquisition in young infants,” Cognition 29, no. 2 (July 1988); and Christine Moon, Robin Panneton Cooper, and William P. Fifer, “Two-day-olds prefer their native language,” Infant Behavior and Development 16, no. 4 (October–December 1993).

  153 “Declining non-native phoneme perception” has been a major focus of study by infant psychologist Janet F. Werker of the University of Ottawa; her academic reports on the subject include “Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life,” Infant Behavior & Development 25, no. 1 (January–March 2002); and “Infant-directed speech supports phonetic category learning in English and Japanese,” Cognition 103, no. 1 (April 2007). A less technical description of her work can be found in her article “Becoming a native listener,” American Scientist 77, no. 1 (January–February 1989).

  154 For information on early language development, see Robert J. Ruben, “A time frame of critical/sensitive periods of language development,” Acta Otolaryngologica 117, no. 2 (March 1997). Early rapidity in the acquisition of sign language is discussed in John D. Bonvillian et al., “Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development,” Child Development 54, no. 6 (December 1983). Studies on the decline in the brain’s ability to acquire language over time include Helen Neville and Daphne Bavelier, “Human brain plasticity: Evidence from sensory deprivation and altered language experience,” Progress in Brain Research 138 (2002); Aaron J. Newman et al., “A critical period for right hemisphere recruitment in American Sign Language processing,” Nature Neuroscience 5, no. 1 (January 2002); Rachel I. Mayberry et al., “Age of acquisition effects on the functional organization of language in the adult brain,” Brain & Language 119, no. 1 (October 2011); and Nils Skotara et al., “The influence of language deprivation in early childhood on L2 processing: An ERP comparison of deaf native signers and deaf signers with a delayed language acquisition,” BMC Neuroscience 13, no. 44 (provisionally published May 3, 2012).

  155 The deaf man who had no language at all until the age of twenty-seven is the subject of Susan Schaller, A Man without Words (1995).

  156 The estimate of the incidence of hearing impairment in prisoners comes from Katrina Miller, “Population management strategies for deaf and hard-of-hearing offenders,” Corrections Today 64, no. 7 (December 2002). Miller and her colleague McKay Vernon have written extensively on the experience of deaf prisoners; see Katrina Miller and McKay Vernon, “Deaf sex offenders in a prison population,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 8, no. 3 (July 2003); McKay Vernon and Katrina Miller, “Obstacles faced by deaf people in the criminal justice system,” American Annals of the Deaf 150, no. 3 (Summer 2005); and McKay Vernon, “The horror of being Deaf and in prison,” American Annals of the Deaf 155, no. 3 (Summer 2010). For a journalistic report on the subject, see James Ridgway’s “The secret world of deaf prisoners,” Mother Jones, October 2009.

  157 The rate of vocabulary acquisition of deaf children of hearing parents is reviewed in Raymond D. Kent, editor, The MIT Encyclopedia of Communication Disorders (2004), pages 336–37: “As measured by parental reports on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI)l, the average hearing child progresses rapidly from an expressive vocabulary of approximately 100 words at 18 months to 300 words at 2 years and 550 words at 3 years (Fenson et al., 1993). In contrast, the average deaf toddler with hearing parents produces about 30 words at 2 years and 200 words at 3 years, whether those words are spoken or signed (Mayne, Yoshinago-Itano, Sedey, and Carey, 2000). Deaf children whose hearing loss was identified by 6 months of age and who have above-average cognitive skills fare best, showing a vocabulary spurt in the third year of life similar to that found in hearing children, though about 6 months later (Mayne et al., 2000). However, even these successful deaf children fall below the 25th percentile for hearing children on norms for the CDI at 30–36 months of age (see also Mayne, Yoshinago-Itano, and Sedey, 2000). Thus, the average 5- to 6-year-old deaf child is some 2 years behind hearing peers in vocabulary size when the child begins the task of learning to read.”

  For a current, authoritative review on vocabulary development in deaf children, see John L. Luckner and Christine Cooke’s “A summary of the vocabulary research with students who are deaf or hard of hearing,” American Annals of the Deaf 155, no. 1 (Spring 2010): “Word learning is an incremental process that begins at birth and continues throughout life. Research (e.g., Anglin, 1993; Biemiller, 2005, 2006; Biemiller & Slonim, 2001) suggests that average hearing children acquire the meaning of about 860 root words per year (e.g., desk, sleep, cousin), or about 2.4 root words per day, for a total of approximately 6,000 root words by the end of second grade. The literature consistently suggests that the vocabulary knowledge of students who are deaf or hard of hearing is quantitatively reduced as compared to that of typical hearing peers. More specifically, it has frequently been reported that students who are deaf or hard of hearing are delayed in their acquisition of vocabulary knowledge, have smaller lexicons, acquire new words at slower rates, and have a narrower range of contexts that result in word learning (Cole & Flexer, 2007; Easterbrooks & Estes, 2007; Lederberg, 2003; Lederberg & Spencer, 2001; Marschark & Wauters, 2008; Paul, 2009; Rose, McAnally, & Quigley, 2004; Schirmer, 2000; Trezek, Wang, & Paul, 2010).”

  From The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education, pages 264–67, “Moelle
r (2000) assessed receptive vocabulary by administering the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to 112 DOH children at 5 years of age with hearing aids and no cognitive impairment. Children had received services from one early intervention program in Nebraska for 6 months and then were placed in an auditory/oral or total communication program (approximately equal proportions), depending on which was ‘determined to be most appropriate to meet the needs of the child and family’ (p. 3). Half of the children scored within one SD of the norms for hearing 5-year-olds. Family involvement and age at intervention were the only factors affecting lexical knowledge, accounting for more than 55% of the variance of language scores. Low involvement by families was devastating and was even more important than age at first intervention. Children whose parents were rated as having ‘ideal’ or ‘good’ involvement with their children’s education (45% of the sample) had language scores comparable to hearing peers; standard scores averaged from 85 to 100, varying inversely with age of identification. Children whose parents were less involved (average to limited) had small lexicons with standard scores ranging from 60 to 80 depending on age of identification. Language scores were not related to mode of communication. Others have also found the quality of family participation in early intervention programs predicts later preschool language achievement (Calderon, 2000; Sarant, Holt, Dowell, Rickards, & Blarney, 2009).