LANGUAGE; Is It Always Spoken?
What's language?
At what age do most babies learn to speak? How do they learn to speak?
How do you think deaf babies learn to communicate? How do deaf people communicate?
Most of us know a little about how babies learn to talk. From the time infants are born, they hear language because their parents talk to them all the time. Between the ages of seven and ten months most infants begin to make sounds. They repeat the same sounds over and over again. For example, a baby may repeat the sound "dadada" or "bababa." This activity is called babbling. When babies babble, they are practicing their language. Soon, the sound "dadada" may become "daddy," and "bababa" may become "bottle".
What happens, though, to children who cannot hear? How do deaf children learn to communicate? Recently, doctors have learned that deaf babies babble with their hands. Laura Ann Petitto, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has studied how children learn language. She observed three hearing infants had English-speaking parents. The two deaf infants had deaf mothers and fathers who used (ASL) American Sign Language to communicate with each other and with their babies. Dr. Petitto studied the babies three times: at 10, 12, and 14 months. During this time, children really begin to develop their language kills.
After watching and videotaping the children for several hundred hours, the psychologist and her assistants made many important observations. For example, they saw that the hearing children made many different, varied motions with their hands. However, there appeared to be no pattern to these motions. The deaf babies also made many different movements with their hands, but these movements were more consistent and deliberate. the deaf babies seemed to make the same hand movements over and over again. During the four-months period, the deaf babies' hand motions started to resemble some of the basic hand-shapes used in ASL. The children also seemed to prefer certain hand-shapes.
Hearing infants start first with simple syllable babbling (dadada), then put more syllables together to sound like real sentences and questions. Apparently, deaf babies follow this same pattern, too. First, they repeat simple hand-shapes. Next, they form some simple hand signs (words) and use these movements together to resemble ASL sentences.
Linguists -people who study language- believe that our ability for language is innate. In other words. humans are born with the capacity for language. It does not matter if we are physically able to speak or not Language can be expressed in many different ways -for instance, by speech or by sing. Dr. Petitto believes this theory and wants to prove it. She plans to study hearing children who have one deaf parent and one hearing parent. Dr. Petitto wants to see what happens when babies have the opportunity to learn both sign language and speech. Does the human brain prefer speech? Some of these studies of hearing babies who have one deaf parent and one hearing parents show that the babies babble equally with their hands and their voice. They also produce their first words, both spoken and signed, at about the same time.
The capacity for language is uniquely human. More studies in the future may prove that the sign system of the deaf is the physical equivalent of speech. If so, the old theory that only the spoken word is language will have to be changed. The whole concept of human communication will have a very new and different meaning.