James.Womack@f14.n300.z1.fidonet.org (James Womack) (04/15/91)
Index Number: 14880
[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]
My argument as to why deaf children separate bound morphemes
is that I think they see them as two separate signs. It is not
because of the teacher's input. The students see the bound morpheme
and the root word as two units of meaning. The mind seems to process
them individually as two signs rather than as one unit.
The research that I conducted supports this idea (S. Supalla,
1986, S. Supalla & Newort, forthcoming). I did some research at a
mainstream program with about 30 elementary aged (10-12) deaf
children who had never been exposed to ASL. They h ad only been
exposed to SEE 2. They had never had any contact with ASL or any
other natural signed language. When I signed with them, I used a
pidgin rather than ASL because I didn't want them to copy me. When
I asked the teacher about how the st udents signed, she responded
that she didn't feel that they signed SEE 2. As I watched them I
found that they weren't signing SEE 2 but they weren't signing ASL
either.
It was also interesting that the deaf children didn't
understand what it meant to be deaf. When the teacher introduced me
as a deaf person like them, I discovered that they didn't know what
that meant. For example, one boy said that his par ents were deaf.
As it turned out, he thought anyone who knew how to sign was "deaf".
As I conducted my research, I came to the conclusion that the
MCE signs didn't make sense to the deaf children. As a result they
modified the signs and created their own linguistic structures that
made sense to them and that conformed to the modality constraints on
signed (versus spoken) languages. Their sign system looked like ASL
in that it was spatially-based but it was not ASL. (Demonstration
of the SEE 2 and ASL equivalents for the sentence: "He yells at
her.") The SEE 2 sign sy stem does not use directionality of verbs
nor is it spacially-based like ASL. SEE 2's morphology is also
sequential in nature rather than simultaneous like ASL.
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