Language in Motion: Preface, page 3

Preface to Language in Motion: Exploring the Nature of Sign continued . . .

Must languages be spoken or written? Are there forms of language other than the one with which most people are accustomed? The answer, of course, is yes: sign language. Like all languages, it consists of symbols that are combined according to rules (syntax) in order to convey thoughts and feelings. What are the symbols of a sign language? Instead of sounds or printed figures, they are the images made by fingers, hands, and arms--images that are linguistically shaped by movements of the eyes, eyebrows, lips, and cheeks, by the hunching and twisting of the shoulders, by the signer's posture. In the United States and in most of Canada the language of signs is called American Sign Language or, as it is commonly abbreviated, ASL. For deaf people ASL is fundamental to communication. It is their language.

Speech and Language

That the word language derives from lingua ("tongue") betrays the common confusion about the relation between speech and language. For many earlier linguists, the words were synonymous(3). The notion of a language not arising from spoken communication received little attention from leaders of language-development studies, and they in turn heavily influenced educators of deaf children. Because sign languages are not spoken, educators until recently did not accept the signing behavior prevalent in the Deaf community as a language. This gave them a reason for barring sign language from the classroom and, to the extent possible, from the schoolyard. Thus, the failure to separate speech from language had a profound influence on the education of deaf students. To avoid repeating that error, consider our definition of speech: Speech consists of vocal utterances that may or may not be meaningful to others. The key difference between speech, as we have defined it, and language is the requirement of meaningfulness. Speech does not need to be meaningful; language does.

Are speech and language independent of each other? If they are, we should find speech without language as well as language without speech. To illustrate speech without language, we could point to talking birds. A parrot's utterances lack meaning and do not intentionally express thoughts and emotions. The bird does not necessarily want to eat when it says, "Polly wants a cracker!" It is merely repeating words it has been taught to say.

Turning to human examples of speech without language, consider glossolalia (speaking in tongues), which is sometimes heard in Pentecostal churches. It is speech without discernible meaning. Patients with certain forms of aphasia may speak but their words make no sense. Likewise, deaf persons with aphasia have been found to produce strings of signs that have no meaning to others (4).

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