1989 - Seeing Voices (11 page)

If some deaf children do so much better than others, despite the most profound deafness, then it cannot be deafness as such that is producing problems but rather some of the
consequences
of deafness—in particular, difficulties or distortions in communicative life from the start. It cannot be pretended that Fremont is average; Braefield, alas, gives a better picture of the average situation of deaf children. But Fremont does show what, in ideal circumstances, deaf children can achieve; and it shows that it is not their innate linguistic or intellectual powers that are at fault, but rather obstructions to the normal development of these.

A visit to the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York was different again. For the population here, while not as disadvantaged as that of Braefield, lacked the peculiar advantages of Fremont (viz., a high proportion of deaf parents and a large deaf community). Yet I saw many (prelingually) deaf adolescents who had been, according to their teachers, almost languageless, or linguistically incompetent, in childhood, who were now doing very well—doing physics or creative writing, for instance, quite as well as hearing students. These children had been disabled earlier, and at great risk of permanent linguistic and intellectual disability, but had gone on—with intensive education—…to attain good language and good communication in spite of this.

What emerges from the stories of Joseph and Ildefonso and others like them is a sense of peril—the especial peril that threatens human development, both intellectual and emotional, if the healthy acquisition of language fails to occur. In an extreme case there may be a complete failure in the acquisition of language, complete incomprehension of the idea of language. And language, as Church reminds us, is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what separates thought from non-thought, what separates the human from the nonhuman.

None of us can remember how we ‘acquired’ language; St. Augustine’s description is a beautiful myth.
65

65. 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 shewn 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 which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, 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 1:8

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 language, 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.’ ‘ (
Philosophical Investigations: 32
)

Nor are we, as parents, called on to ‘teach’ our children language; they acquire it, or seem to, in the most automatic way, through virtue of being children, our children, and the communicative exchanges between us.

It is customary to distinguish grammar, verbal meanings, and communicative intent—the syntax, the semantics, the pragmatics of language—but as Bruner and others remind us, these always go together in the learning and use of language; and therefore, it is not language but language
use
we must study. The
first
language use, the first communication, is usually between mother and child, and language is acquired, arises,
between
the two.

One is born with one’s senses; these are ‘natural.’ One can develop motor skills, naturally, by oneself. But one cannot acquire language by oneself:
this
skill comes in a unique category. It is impossible to acquire language without some essential innate ability, but this ability is only activated by another person who already possesses linguistic power and competence. It is only through transaction (or, as Vygotsky would say, ‘negotiation’) with another that the language is achieved. (Wittgenstein writes in general terms of the ‘language games’ we must all learn to play, and Brown speaks of ‘the original word game’ played by mother and child.)

The mother—or father, or teacher, or indeed anyone who talks with the child—leads the infant step by step to higher levels of language; she leads him into language, and into the world picture it embodies (
her
world-picture, because it is her language; and beyond this, the world-picture of the culture she belongs to). The mother must always be a step ahead, in what Vygotsky calls the ‘zone of proximal development’; the infant cannot move into, or conceive of, the next stage ahead except through its being occupied and communicated to him by his mother.

But the mother’s words, and the world behind them, would have no sense for the infant unless they corresponded to something in his own experience. He has an independent experience of the world given to him by his senses, and it is this which forms a correlation or confirmation of the mother’s language, and in turn, is given meaning by it. It is the mother’s language, internalized by the child, that allows it to move from sensation into ‘sense,’ to ascend from a perceptual into a conceptual world.

Social and emotional intercourse, intellectual intercourse too, starts from the first day of life.
66

66. The cognitive aspects of such preverbal intercourse have been especially studied by Jerome Bruner and his colleagues (see Bruner, 1983). Bruner sees in preverbal interactions and ‘conversations’ the general pattern and archetype of all the verbal interactions, the dialogues, that will occur in the future. If these preverbal dialogues fail to occur, or go awry, Bruner feels, the stage is set for serious problems in later verbal intercourse. This, of course, is exactly what may happen—and does happen, if precautionary measures are not taken—with deaf infants, who cannot hear their mothers and who cannot hear the sound of her earliest preverbal communications.

David Wood, Heather Wood, Amanda Griffiths, and Ian Howarth, in their long-term study of deaf children, lay great emphasis on this (Wood et al., 1986). They write:

Imagine a deaf baby with little or no awareness of sound…When he looks at an object or event, he receives none of the ‘mood music’ that accompanies the social experience of the hearing baby. Suppose he looks from an object of his attention to turn to an adult who is ‘sharing’ the experience with him and the adult talks about what he has just been looking at. Does the infant even realize that
communication
is taking place? To discover the relationships between a word and its referent, the deaf infant has to
remember
something he has just observed and
relate
this memory to another observation…The deaf baby has to do much more, ‘discovering’ the relationships between two very different visual experiences that are displaced in time.

These and other major considerations, they feel, are liable to cause major communicative problems long before the development of language.

The deaf children of deaf parents have a fair chance of being spared these interactional difficulties, for their parents know all too well from their own experience that all communication, all play, all games must be visual, and in particular, ‘baby talk’ must move into a visuo-gestural mode. Carol Erting and her colleagues have recently provided beautiful illustrations of the differences between deaf and hearing parents in this regard (Erting, Prezioso, and Hynes, 1989). In fact, an unusually visual, or hypervisual, orientation may be observed in deaf children almost from birth; and it is this, typically, which their parents, if deaf, recognize very early. Deaf children
from the start
show a different organization, and one which requires (as it demands) a different sort of response. Sensitive hearing parents may recognize this to some extent, and become quite skilled in visual interaction themselves. But there is a limit to what hearing parents, however loving, can provide; for they are, in their nature, auditory and not visual beings. A further, totally visual interaction is needed, if the deaf child is to develop his own special and unique identity—and this can only be conferred by another visual being, another deaf person.

Vygotsky was greatly interested in these prelinguistic, pre-intellectual stages of life, but his especial interest was in language and thought and how they come together in the development of the child. Vygotsky never forgets that language is always, and at once, both social and intellectual in function, nor does he forget for a moment the relation of intellect and affect, of how all communication, all thought, is also emotional, reflecting ‘the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses’ of the individual.

The corollary to all this is that if communication goes awry, it will affect intellectual growth, social intercourse, language development, and emotional attitudes, all at once, simultaneously and inseparably. And this, of course, is what may happen, what does happen, all too frequently, when a child is born deaf. Thus Hilde Schlesinger and Kathryn Meadow say, as the first sentence of their book,
Sound and Sign
:
67

Profound childhood deafness is more than a medical diagnosis; it is a cultural phenomenon in which social, emotional, linguistic, and intellectual patterns and problems are inextricably bound together.

67. Schlesinger and Meadow, 1972. Very detailed studies have also been carried out by Wood et al. in England, who, like Schlesinger, see the mediating role of parents and teachers as crucial and bring out how often, and in what various and subtle ways, this may be defective when dealing with deaf children.

It is to Schlesinger and her colleagues, over the last twenty years, that we owe the fullest and deepest observations on the problems that may beset the deaf from childhood to adult life, and how these are related to the earliest communications between mother and child (and later, between teacher and pupil)—communications all too often grossly defective or distorted. Schlesinger’s central concern is with how children and, in particular, deaf children—are ‘coaxed’ from a perceptual to a conceptual world, how crucially dependent this is upon such a dialogue. She has shown how the ‘dialectic leap’ that Vygotsky speaks of—the leap from sensation to thought—involves not just talking, but the right
sort
of talking, a dialogue rich in communicative intent, in mutuality, and in the right sort of questioning, if the child is to make this great leap successfully.

Recording the conversational transactions of mother and child from earliest life, she has shown how often, and with what dire effects, this may go wrong when the child is deaf. Children, healthy children, are endlessly curious: they are constantly seeking cause and meaning, constantly asking ‘Why?’ ‘How?’ ‘What if?’ It was the absence of such questioning, and the very incomprehension of such question forms, that struck so ominous a note when I visited Braefield. Writing in more general terms about the all-too-common problems of the deaf, Schlesinger notes:
68

68. Schlesinger, Hilde. ‘Buds of Development: Antecedents of Academic Achievement,’ work in progress.

At eight years of age, many deaf youngsters show a delay in their understanding of questions, still continue to label, do not impose ‘central meanings’ to their answers. They have a poor sense of causation, and rarely introduce ideas about the future.

Many, but not all. There tends, indeed, to be a rather sharp distinction between children who have these problems and those who do not, between those who are intellectually, linguistically, socially, and emotionally ‘normal’ and those who are not. This distinction, so different from the normal bell-curve distribution of abilities, shows that the dichotomy occurs after birth, that there must be early life experiences with a decisive power to determine the entire future. The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously,
de novo
, or directly from the impact of experience; it stems, it is stimulated, by communicative exchange—it requires
dialogue
, in particular the complex dialogue of mother and child.
69

69. This interplay is a major concern of cognitive psychology. See especially L.S. Vygotsky,
Thought and Language;
A.R. Luria and F. la. Yudovich,
Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child;
and Jerome Bruner,
Child’s Talk
. And, of course (and most especially with regard to the development of emotion, fantasy, creativity, and play) this is equally the concern of analytical psychology. See D.W. Winnicott,
The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment;
M. Mahler, F. Pine, and A. Bergman,
The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant;
and Daniel N. Stern,
The Interpersonal World of the Infant
.

It is here, Schlesinger finds, that the dichotomies start:
70

70. Schlesinger, 1988, p. 262.

Mothers talk with their children, do so very differently, and tend to be more often at one side or the other of a series of dichotomies. Some talk
with
their youngsters and participate primarily in dialogue; some primarily talk
at
their children. Some mainly support the actions of their offspring, and if not, provide reasons why not; others primarily control the actions of their children, and do not explain why. Some ask genuine questions…others constraint questions…Some are prompted by what the child says or does; others by their own inner needs and interests…Some describe a large world in which events happened in the past and will happen in the future; others comment only about the here and now…Some mothers mediate the environment by endowing stimuli with meaning [and others do not].