Language Development for the Deaf

• The ability to communicate thoughts through rudimentary gestures alleviates the feeling of isolation in a totally silent world where no words are spoken or heard.

Development of Language for the Deaf

• In 1755, Abbé Michel de l'Épée developed a simple language with vocabulary and grammar.
• The school founded in Paris taught people who had lost their hearing to communicate through hand and arm movements, known as the "manual" method.
• Simultaneously, a different system developed in England and Germany.
• Proponents of this different system rejected the French method and instead favored teaching the deaf to enunciate words and lip-read, known as the "oral" method.

Introduction to the United States

• In 1815, a group of concerned Connecticut citizens sent Thomas Gallaudet to Europe to assess the manual and oral approaches, because the United States had no schools for the deaf at the time.
• People running the English school were unwilling to share their teaching methods with Gallaudet.
• Gallaudet went to France.
• After living in Paris, he returned to Connecticut to spread the French method.
• Gallaudet opened the first free school for the deaf within a year.
• This school later became the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.
• He used American Sign Language (ASL) there.
• ASL involves signs that are word-like units which use one or both hands to form shapes and distinctive movements.
• The grammar of ASL consists of spatial relations, direction, and orientation of hand movements.
• It shares some elements with spoken English.
• Other schools that taught ASL opened, and for the next few decades ASL predominated in the United States.

Alternative Methods

• In the 1840s, the alternative (oral) method, using actual speech and lip-reading, was introduced at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Worcester, Massachusetts.
• Both methods have generated debates.
• Opponents of speech/lip-reading say that students who have never heard speech cannot duplicate it well enough to understood properly.
• Additionally, lip-reading can be misleading, as examples like "mat", "bat", and "pat" look the same on the lips.
• Opponents of ASL say that students communicate only among themselves and are thus cut off from contact with the rest of the population.

Total Communication and Progress

• In 1969, a large residential school in Maryland introduced the concept of total communication which is influential today because it uses a combination of whatever works for a particular individual.
• Options include speech, lip-reading, signing, mime, gestures, finger spelling, art, reading, writing, and use of electronic media.
• Since the mid-twentieth century, barriers have been removed, aimed towards progress, with federal and state legislation.
• This includes the advocacy of parents and educators, and the challenges of individual citizens.
• An example of progress is Shannon Merryman, a sixteen-year-old Rhode Island high school student who communicated through ASL after losing her hearing at age two.
• When the sponsors of the Voice of Democracy contest rejected her application, she successfully challenged the legality of their act.
• She didn't win the competition, but opened an opportunity for the hearing-impaired to participate in mainstream American life.
• The contest topic that year was "My Voice in America's Future."