1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  But though her language abilities are so good, her ability to communicate has marked limitations. Her speech is still difficult to understand, has a ‘chopped-up quality,’ and leaves out many of the sounds of spontaneous speech. She can be understood well by her parents and teachers, but much less well by anyone else. She can clarify her meaning with expressive Cuing, but the number of people who understand Cue is minimal. She is also somewhat below normal in her ability to pick up speech: lip-reading is not just a visual skill—75 percent of it is a sort of inspired guessing or hypothesizing, dependent on the use of contextual clues. It is easier for the postlingually deaf, who know speech, to ‘read’ it; much more difficult for the prelingually deaf, like Alice. Thus, although she is in the hearing world, she faces great difficulties—and potential isolation—in it too. Life at home, before the age of five, with understanding parents, may not place too many demands upon a deaf child, but life thereafter is very different. The problems of a child with grossly defective speech and hearing are liable to increase dramatically with each year at school.

  Alice’s parents are open-minded, and did not force her exclusively toward Cuing; indeed, they were astonished that it worked. But they have clear preferences as to the world they would like their daughter to inhabit: ‘I want her to go either way,’ says her father, ‘but in my mind’s eye I prefer to think of her in the hearing world, marrying a hearing person, etc. But she’d gain a tremendous amount of strength from another deaf person…She loves signing too, she needs a relationship with another signer. I hope she can feel at home in both deaf and hearing worlds.’ One must hope that Alice can learn Sign, and now—because very soon it will be too late for her to acquire it with native competence. And if she does not acquire it, she may not find herself at home in either world.

  We started a sign language class at our home studying Signed Exact English, SEE, an exact replication of spoken English in signs, which we felt would help us in passing on our English language, literature, and culture to our child. As hearing parents we were overwhelmed by the task of learning a new language ourselves and having to teach it to Charlotte simultaneously, so the familiarity of English syntax made sign language seem accessible to us…We desperately wanted to believe that Charlotte was similar to us.

  After a year we decided to move away from the rigidity of SEE to pidgin Signed English, a mixture of American Sign Language vocabulary, which is more visually descriptive, and English syntax, which is familiar…[but] the elaborate linear structures of spoken English don’t translate into interesting sign language, so we had to reorient the way we thought to produce visual sentences. We were introduced to the most lively and exciting aspects of signing: idioms, humor, mime, whole-concept signs, and facial expression…Now we are moving to American Sign Language, studying it with a deaf woman, a native signer who can communicate in signs without hesitation and can codify the language for us hearing people. We are excited and stimulated by the process of learning an ingenious and sensible language which has such beauty and imagination. It is a delight to realize that Charlotte’s signing reflects visual thought patterns. We are startled into thinking differently about physical objects, and their placement and motion, because of Charlotte’s expressions.

  I found this narrative powerful and fascinating, indicating how Charlotte’s parents first wanted to believe their daughter essentially similar to themselves, despite the fact that she uses her eyes, not her ears; how they first used SEE, which has no real structure of its own, but is a mere transliteration of an auditory language, and how they only gradually came to appreciate the fundamental visuality of their child, her use of ‘visual thought patterns,’ and how this both needed and generated a visual language. Rather than imposing their auditory world on their child, as so many parents of the deaf do, they encouraged her to advance into her own (visual) world, which they were then able to share with her. By the age of four, indeed, Charlotte had advanced so far into visual thinking and language that she was able to provide new ways of thinking—revelations—to her parents.

  Early in 1987, Charlotte and her family moved from California to Albany, New York, and her mother wrote again to me:

  Charlotte is now a six-year-old first-grader. We, of course, feel she is a remarkable person because, although profoundly deaf, she is interested, thoughtful, competent within her (mainly) hearing world. She seems comfortable in both ASL and English, communicates enthusiastically with deaf adults and children and reads and writes at a third-grade level. Her hearing brother, Nathaniel, is fluent and easy in Sign; our family conducts many conversations and much business in sign language…I feel our experience bears out the idea that early exposure to visually coherent language develops complex conceptual thought processes. Charlotte knows how to think and how to reason. She uses effectively the linguistic tools she has been given to build complicated ideas.

  When I went to visit Charlotte and her family, the first thing that struck me was that they were a family—full of fun, full of liveliness, full of questions, all together. There was none of the isolation one so often sees with the deaf—and none of the ‘primitive’ language (‘What’s this? What’s that? Do this! Do that!’), the condescension, of which Schlesinger speaks. Charlotte herself was full of questions, full of curiosity, full of life—a delightful, imaginative, and playful child, vividly turned to the world and to others. She was disappointed that I did not sign, but instantly commandeered her parents as interpreters and questioned me closely about the wonders of New York.

  About thirty miles from Albany is a forest and river, and here I later drove with Charlotte, her parents, and her brother. Charlotte loves the natural world as much as the human world, but loves it in an intelligent way. She had an eye for different habitats, for the way things live together; she perceived cooperation and competition, the dynamics of existence. She was fascinated by the ferns that grew by the river, saw that they were very different from the flowers, understood the distinction between spores and seeds. She would exclaim excitedly in Sign over all the shapes and colors, but then attend and pause to ask, ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ Clearly, it was not isolated facts that she wanted, but connections, understanding, a world with sense and meaning. Nothing showed me more clearly the passage from a perceptual to a conceptual world, a passage impossible without complex dialogue—a dialogue that first occurs with the parents, but is then internalized as ‘talking to oneself,’ as thought.

  Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, ‘inner speech,’ and it is this that is indispensable for our further development, our thinking. ‘Inner speech,’ says Vygotsky, ‘is speech almost without words…it is not the interior aspect of external speech, it is a function in itself…While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.’ We start with dialogue, with language that is external and social, but then to think, to become ourselves, we have to move to a monologue, to inner speech. Inner speech is essentially solitary, and it is profoundly mysterious, as unknown to science, Vygotsky writes, as ‘the other side of the moon.’ ‘We are our language,’ it is often said; but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, in that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the individual mind. It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world. And the inner speech (or inner Sign) of the deaf may be very distinctive. 75

  75. It is certain that we are not ‘given’ reality, but have to construct it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that our language should embody our world view—the way in which we perceive and construct reality. But does it go further—does it determine our world view? This was the notorious hypothesis es
poused by Benjamin Lee Whorf: that language comes before thought, and is the principal determinant of thought and reality (Whorf, 1956). Whorf took his hypothesis to ultimate lengths: ‘A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos’ (thus, he felt, from contrasting their tense systems, that English speakers would be disposed to a Newtonian world view, but Hopi speakers to a relativistic and Einsteinian world view). His thesis gave rise to much misunderstanding and controversy, some of a frankly racist kind; but the evidence, as Roger Brown remarks, is ‘extraordinarily difficult to interpret,’ not least because we lack adequate independent definitions of thought and language.

  But the difference between the most diverse spoken languages is small compared to the difference between speech and Sign. Sign differs in origins, and in biological mode. And this, in a way deeper than anything Whorf envisaged, may determine, or at least modify, the thought processes of those who sign, and give them a unique and untranslatable, hypervisual cognitive style.

  It is evident to her parents that Charlotte constructs her world in a different way, perhaps radically so: that she employs predominantly visual thought patterns, and that she ‘thinks differently’ about physical objects. I was struck by the graphic quality, the fullness of her descriptions. Her parents spoke too of this fullness: ‘All the characters or creatures or objects Charlotte talks about are placed, ’ her mother said; ‘spatial reference is essential to ASL. When Charlotte signs, the whole scene is set up; you can see where everyone or everything is; it is all visualized with a detail that would be rare for the hearing.’ This placing of objects and people in specific locations, this use of elaborate, spatial reference had been striking in Charlotte, her parents said, since the age of four and a half—already at that age she had gone beyond them, shown a sort of ‘staging’ power, an ‘architectural’ power that they had seen in other deaf people—but rarely in the hearing. 76

  76. I was reminded, when they said this, of an anecdote I had read about Ibsen: that once, when walking with a friend through a house they had never been in before, he turned suddenly and said, ‘What was in that room we just passed?’ His friend had only the vaguest notion, but Ibsen gave a most exact description of everything in the room, its appearance, its location, its relation to everything else, and then said, under his breath, as if to himself, ‘I see everything.’

  Language and thought, for us, are always personal—our utterances express ourselves, as does our inner speech. Language often feels to us, therefore, like an effusion, a sort of spontaneous transmission of self. It does not occur to us at first that it must have a structure, a structure of an immensely intricate and formal kind. We are unconscious of this structure; we do not see it, any more than we see the tissues, the organs, the architectural makeup of our own bodies. But the enormous, unique freedom of language would not be possible without the most extreme grammatical constraints. It is grammar, first of all, that makes a language possible, that allows us to articulate our thoughts, our selves, in utterance.

  This was clear, in regard to speech, by 1660 (the date of the Port-Royal Grammar), but was only established, in regard to Sign, in 1960. 77

  77. Earlier concepts of grammar (as in the pedagogic Latin grammars that still torment schoolchildren) had been based on a mechanical, not a creative, concept of language. The Port-Royal Grammar saw grammar as essentially creative, speaking of ‘that marvelous invention by which we construct from twenty-five or thirty sounds an infinity of expressions, which, having no resemblance in themselves to what takes place in our minds, still enable us to let others know the secret of what we conceive and of all the varied mental activities we carry out.’

  Sign was not seen, even by signers, as a true language, with its own grammar, before then. And yet the notion that Sign might have an internal structure is not entirely new—it has, so to speak, an odd prehistory of its own. Thus Roch-Ambroise Bebian, Sicard’s successor, not only realized that Sign had an autonomous grammar of its own (and thus had no need of an alien and imported French grammar), but tried to compile a ‘Mimography’ based on ‘The Decomposition of Signs.’ This enterprise failed, and had to fail, because there was no correct identification of the actual (‘phonemic’) elements of Sign.

  In the 1870’s E.B. Tylor, the anthropologist, had a deep interest in language, and this included a deep interest in and knowledge of Sign (he was a fluent signer, with many deaf friends). His Researches into the Early History of Mankind contained many fascinating insights into signed language, and might have inaugurated a true linguistic study of Sign, had this enterprise not been killed, as was any just valuation of Sign, by the Milan conference of 1880. With the official and formal devaluation of Sign, linguists turned their attention elsewhere, and either ignored it, or misunderstood it completely. J.G. Kyle and B. Woll detail this sad history in their book, remarking that such was Tylor’s knowledge of the grammar of Sign has to make it obvious that ‘linguists have only been rediscovering [it] over the past ten years.’ 78

  78. Kyle and Woll, 1985, p. 55.

  Notions that ‘the sign language’ of the deaf is no more than a sort of pantomime, or pictorial language, were almost universally held even thirty years ago. The Encyclopedia Britannica (14 ed.) calls it ‘a species of picture writing in the air’; and a well-known standard text tells us: 79

  79. Myklebust, 1960.

  The manual sign language used by the deaf is an Ideographic language. Essentially it is more pictorial, less symbolic, and as a system is one which falls mainly at the level of imagery. Ideographic language systems, in comparison with verbal symbol systems, lack precision, subtlety and flexibility. It is likely that Man cannot achieve his ultimate potential through an Ideographic language, inasmuch as it is limited to the more concrete aspects of his experience.

  There is, indeed, a paradox here: at first Sign looks pantomimic; if one pays attention, one feels, one will ‘get it’ soon enough—all pantomimes are easy to get. But as one continues to look, no such ‘Aha!’ feeling occurs; one is tantalized by finding it, despite its seeming transparency, unintelligible. 80

  80. One must wonder whether there is not also an intellectual (and almost physiological) difficulty here. It is not easy to imagine a grammar in space (or a grammaticization of space). This was not even a concept before Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi conceived it, in 1970 (even to the deaf, who used such a grammar-space). Our extraordinary difficulty in even imagining a spatial grammar, a spatial syntax, a spatial language—imagining a linguistic use of space—may stem from the fact that ‘we’ (the hearing, who do not sign), lacking any personal experience of grammaticizing space ourselves (and lacking, indeed, any cerebral substrate for it) are physiologically unable to imagine what it is like (any more than we can imagine having a tailor seeing infrared).

  There was no linguistic attention, no scientific attention, given to Sign until the late 1950’s when William Stokoe, a young medievalist and linguist, found his way to Gallaudet College. Stokoe thought he had come to teach Chaucer to the deaf; but he very soon perceived that he had been thrown, by good fortune or chance, into one of the world’s most extraordinary linguistic environments. Sign language, at this time, was not seen as a proper language, but as a sort of pantomime or gestural code, or perhaps a sort of broken English on the hands. It was Stokoe’s genius to see, and prove, that it was nothing of the sort; that it satisfied every linguistic criterion of a genuine language, in its lexicon and syntax, its capacity to generate an infinite number of propositions. In 1960 Stokoe published Sign Language Structure, and in 1965 (with his deaf colleagues Dorothy Casterline and Carl Croneberg) A Dictionary of American Sign Language. Stokoe was convinced that signs were not pictures, but complex abstract symbols with a complex inner structure. He was the first, then, to look for a structure, to analyze signs, to dissect them, to search for constituent parts. Very early he proposed that each sign had at least three independent parts—location, handshape, and movement (analogous to the phonemes of speec
h)—and that each part had a limited number of combinations. 81

  81. A particularly nice confirmation of Stokoe’s insight is provided by ‘slips of the hand.’ These are never arbitrary errors, never movements or handshapes that do not occur in the language, but only errors of combination (transposition, etc.) in a limited set of place or movement or handshape parameters. They are entirely analogous to the phonemic errors that are involved in slips of the tongue.

  Besides these errors (which involve unconscious transpositions of sublexical elements), there are among native signers elaborate forms of Sign wit and Art Sign, which involve conscious, creative plays on signs and their constituents. Such signers clearly have an intuitive awareness of the internal structure of signs.

  Yet another (if offbeat) testament to the syntactic and phonemic structure of Sign comes from ‘mad Sign’ or ‘Sign salad,’ which may be seen in states of schizophrenic psychosis. Here, typically, signs are split up, deconstituted, reconstituted, subject to neologistic formations and bizarre (but not ‘illegal’) grammatical distortions. This is exactly what happens with spoken language in so-called ‘schizophrenese’ or ‘word salad.’

  I have also seen an interesting isolation and exaggeration of different phonemic elements of signs (convulsive alteration of the location or direction of a sign, for example, while keeping the handshape constant; or vice versa) in a nine-year-old deaf girl who has Tourette’s syndrome; similar strange emphases and distortions of spoken words may occur in hearing children who have Tourette’s.

  In Sign Language Structure he delineated nineteen different handshapes, twelve locations, twenty-four types of movements, and invented a notation for these—American Sign Language had never been written before. 82