British Sign Language or Deprivation - An evidence base of harm reduction and human rights

This chapter refers to “deaf” people by Basilier’s definition of “social deafness” – “deafness which with the best hearing aids available (that the person will use) does not allow understanding of speech through the ears well enough to take part in a brisk conversation” (Basilier). It also refers to “Deaf” deaf people – being culturally Deaf members of the Deaf Community using BSL.

BSL, British Sign Language, is just that - the native language of Deaf people in Britain and the UK comprising a rich lexicon of signs. This should come as no surprise, given the name of the language. However, it is important to remember that it is indeed a language and not a sign system, a code for English, or a manual pidgin.

It, like the different sign languages of other countries, evolved and is evolving naturally amongst the members of the Deaf Community for as long as Deaf people have communicated together. It has its own grammar as well as vocabulary and, like any two distinct languages, there is no direct word-for-sign correspondence between English and BSL. People naïve to sign languages are often surprised to learn that alongside the handshapes, locations and movements of manual sign components, BSL also includes ‘spoken’ and ‘oral’ components (mouth-patterns that do and do not represent English words respectively), facial expression, eye gaze, and head nods and shakes (Sutton‐Spence & Woll, 1999), and – unlike Sign-Supported English (simplified BSL vocabulary within an English grammatical structure, akin to Franglais), Cued English (National Cued Speech Association, 2006) (a phoneme-based system that assists lip-reading), Makaton (Results, n.d.) (a programme integrating speech, signs and symbols), or Paget Gorman (PGSS, 1990) (a manually coded form of English) - BSL fulfils all of Hockett’s Design Features of Language (Hockett, 1960) as well as being recognised as a “fully fledged indigenous language” in Europe (Leeson, 2006).

It is common for a person fluent in language A and less fluent in language B to perceive language B as less sophisticated than A. Foreign or second-languages always seem to be relatively simple or pidgin, since we see them through the lens of our own first language – because that is the language in which we think. Similarly, we do not notice the ways in which our own language contains clumsily thrown-together compound words and ideas because we are too used to them. For example, the German for “nipples” is “brustwarzen”, which is a compound word from the German for “breast” and “warts”. To a native English speaker not fluent in German this appears both charming and clumsy – but, the English word “business” equally is a compound word from another English word meaning “occupied/active” (“busy”) and a suffix meaning “I mean this as a noun” (“ness”). English speakers do not even notice this, just as we do not notice “become”, “also”, “forty” or “inside” as similarly clumsy bolted-together compound words. Likewise it does not take much for a non-fluent signer to consider the BSL sign BELIEVE as a pidgin compound of signs meaning THINK and TRUE - but this is an illusion caused by unfamiliarity. It does not mean that BSL is any less linguistically sophisticated. Thus, there are no valid linguistic arguments to preferentially teach English to young deaf children over British Sign Language.

Arguments are often made, however, from a societal position – most commonly in the form of “these deaf children will have to function in the hearing world.”

This can be an emotionally evocative argument, but it must be understood from a position of equality and diversity. It is undeniable that it is disadvantageous to be born prelingually profoundly deaf into a society where most others communicate in a medium and in a language that are both functionally inaccessible to you; however it is similarly undeniable that it is disadvantageous, to varying degrees, to be born in the UK Black, gay, or female. It is not within the scope of this chapter to dive deeply into this, ultimately eugenic, debate; but suffice to say here that it is of paramount importance to recognise one’s own hearing- and first-language-English bias when meeting, considering, and often deciding for deaf adults or children.

The Importance of BSL

It is widely understood that one must develop language early in order to develop it properly and as a direct consequence to then develop one’s thinking skills and academic attainment. There is a window of at best five years from birth during which children’s brains, deaf and hearing alike, are attuned to and hungry for language and it is vital that this be capitalised upon at that time because after that a) it is much harder to acquire language and b) they are already in school and gaining very little from it. For deaf children access to spoken language is limited but nevertheless, assuming normal eyesight, access to visual language is unproblematic – and vital. As the Council of Europe have written (Leeson, 2006):

Regardless of educational approach invoked, one thing is clear: early access to language skill development (be that spoken or signed) is essential in order to develop robust language skills, which will allow for further cognitive development and mastery of higher cognitive skills such as literacy and numeracy (MacSweeney, 1998). The difficulty is that access to spoken language input is limited for many due to their degree of deafness, but this fact is not an acceptable reason for denying children an accessible language or an appropriate education that is equal to that available to non-deaf children.

Of course, the primary source of language exposure for under-5’s is the parents, and only 1 in 10 deaf children will have the benefit of signing deaf parents. However:

…deaf children with equivalent ASL [American Sign Language] skills, who had hearing parents, also developed equivalent literacy skills, indicating clearly that competence in a signed language can be achieved when parents are not themselves native signed language users. Therefore the issue of baseline language skill, regardless of modality, is the essential pre-requisite for higher-level cognitive skill development. (Leeson, 2006)

While parents with fluent BSL will provide a better rich-language environment that those less-practised, providing language visually is paramount for a child with no functional auditory channel. Unfortunately:

…parents in many countries are not provided with clear information about what it means to be deaf, and perhaps, most importantly, what it means to deprive a child of an accessible language… Other reasons cited for opting for oral approaches to education include increasing educational outcomes for deaf people (Griffey, 1994): [but] the research across the European Union shows that Deaf people are underemployed and this is often as a direct result of having poor literacy skills (Allsop, 1997) (Matthews, 1996) (Conway, 2006). (Leeson, 2006)

Humphries et al (Tom Humphries, 2012) present the importance of this time for deaf children, tellingly, in the Harm Reduction Journal:

Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language… children who have not acquired a first language in the early years might never be completely fluent in any language… An alternative to speech-exclusive approaches to language acquisition exists in the use of sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), where acquiring a sign language is subject to the same time constraints of spoken language development. Unfortunately, so far, these alternatives are caught up in an “either - or” dilemma, leading to a highly polarized conflict about which system families should choose for their children, with little tolerance for alternatives by either side of the debate and widespread misinformation about the evidence and implications for or against either approach.. By the time it is clear that the deaf child is not acquiring spoken language with cochlear devices, it might already be past the critical period, and the child runs the risk of becoming linguistically deprived. (Tom Humphries, 2012)

So, language deprivation creates harm to the child and to society, and successful cochlear implantation cannot be predicted or known until brain plasticity is essentially over; so advising parents to not sign constitutes an avoidable harm. Language difficulty due to delayed language is permanent, preventable, and unfixable, yet reading develops from either spoken or sign language development. The deaf child needs any accessible language as soon as possible:

The language difficulties endemic to the population of children who are born deaf are completely preventable and caused by a lack of exposure to accessible linguistic input at the right time in human development, namely infancy and early childhood. The language difficulties caused by postponing exposure to accessible language until late childhood and adolescence are permanent and not ameliorated by substituting sign language for spoken language at an older age…. Many deaf children read as well as their normally hearing peers; successful reading achievement can be based on either successful spoken language development or successful sign language development. (Mayberry, 2002)

The irony of providing ‘baby-sign’ to hearing newborns but not BSL to deaf babies is not lost on the Deaf Community…

It is also the case that signing helps, rather than hinders, acquisition of oral language, as demonstrated in a study by Hassazandeh (Hassazandeh, 2012):

The study group consisted of seven deaf, cochlear-implanted children with deaf parents. An equal number of deaf children with normal-hearing parents were selected by matched sampling as a reference group… in order to measure participants’ speech perception, speech production and language development, respectively…. This study confirms that second-generation deaf children exceed deaf children of hearing parents in terms of cochlear implantation performance. Encouraging deaf children to communicate in sign language from a very early age, before cochlear implantation, appears to improve their ability to learn spoken language after cochlear implantation.

Another Council of Europe paper (Krausneker, 2008) frames this in the context of human rights:

Deaf children exposed to signed languages from birth acquire these languages on an identical maturational time course as hearing children acquire spoken languages… (Krausneker, 2008)

In the attempt to secure age-adequate access to linguistic structures for a Deaf child, it is only logical to make use of the visual mode and the visual (signed) languages available in the world - instead of insisting on learning only a spoken language which the child is unable to access or decode easily… (Krausneker, 2008)

Numerous Deaf children are denied the possibility to acquire a language age-adequate and barrier-free. For many of the children who are steered away from any sign language this causes late immersion into to a fully fledged, visually understandable language and consequently extreme delays in its acquisition… (Krausneker, 2008)

People who are deprived of Linguistic Human Rights may thereby be prevented from enjoying other human rights, including fair political representation, a fair trial, access to education, access to information and freedom of speech, and maintenance of their cultural heritage. (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995) (Krausneker, 2008)

Indeed, in the UK, to deprive a deaf child of effective language development by neglecting or supressing visually accessible language meets governmental definitions of Emotional Abuse:

Emotional abuse: the persistent emotional maltreatment of a child such as to cause severe and adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may include not giving the child opportunities to express their views, deliberately silencing them or ‘making fun’ of what they say or how they communicate. It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. These may include interactions that are beyond a child’s developmental capability as well as overprotection and limitation of exploration and learning, or preventing the child from participating in normal social interaction. (Education, 2018) My emphases underlined.

It is clear to this author that the harms are clear, and that the strategies and solutions to those avoidable harms are too.

Bibliography

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Basilier, T. A socio-medical evaluation of hearing loss as a disabling factor (surdophrenia norvegica: part 1). Scand Audio, 1, 55-68.

Conway, P. (2006). Signing in and Signing Out: The Education and Employment Experiences of Deaf Adults in Ireland – A Study of Inequality and Deaf People in Ireland. Dublin: Irish Deaf Society.

Department for Education (2018). Keeping children safe in education. Statutory guidance for schools and colleges.

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Tom Humphries, P. K. (2012). Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches. Harm Reduction Journal, 9(16), 1-9.