University must accept ASL

As a Boston University graduate student of linguistics and a nationally certified American Sign Language/English interpreter of over 10 years, I must respond to the concern about ASL satisfying the foreign language requirement.

Signed languages are used the world over by those people for whom spoken language is not an option. The channel through which speech is received and learned is compromised such that oral/aural communication is less than satisfactory. The intact visual and spatial channels are used instead (eyes and hands in lieu of ears and mouth). Brain imaging studies have shown that signed languages produced by deaf people are processed in the same areas of the brain as spoken languages used by hearing people; empirical evidence shows that while the modality is different, the underlying processing is the same. Like spoken languages, signed languages are acquired naturally by children, who display variations of the same kind and undergo regular linguistic change over time. Both signed and spoken languages share the same fundamental linguistic characteristics. Both reveal the potential of the human language faculty.

Signed languages are not “versions” of their geographically shared spoken languages. Syntactically, ASL and English differ, at times radically, in their syntactic structure. Just as a native Spanish speaker would find incomprehensible (or at least detect second language intrusion if bilingual) someone using Spanish vocabulary in English word order, a deaf ASL user would have the same experience if such a person were to sign in English word order. Morphologically, ASL inflection and derivation are carried out using rule-governed spatial referencing and movement to achieve complex nuances of meaning. English uses the tools at its disposal, bound morphemes and periphrastic constructions, to do the same. Phonologically, English exploits a limited set of sounds and combinations of sounds. ASL similarly exploits systematically a subset of the possible hand shapes, locations, palm orientations, movements, as well as gestures of the face and upper body. ASL is as different from English as English is from Spanish. In fact, British Sign Language is so different from ASL that they are not mutually intelligible. There is no spoken to signed correlation here.

All of the materials necessary to provide a rich curriculum of instruction are available for ASL. There are hosts of qualified instructors in Boston and throughout the nation. There are current textbooks, video and CD-ROM instructional materials, historical and modern prosaic and poetic literature on video, books about deaf people’s experience in America spanning 200 years and elaborate studies in print and on video focusing on cultural issues, regional and dialectal variation, subcultures within the deaf community and educational issues facing deaf people. Furthermore, there is no shortage of students who would register for these classes, which are currently available at BU.

There is no legitimate basis for the university’s assessment that signed languages are intrinsically ineligible for fulfillment of the foreign language requirement. Knowledge of signed languages is invaluable for many academic post-graduate pursuits, and disallowing ASL (and other signed languages) while allowing Twi or Navajo to count for the foreign language requirement is not only unacceptable, it is suspicious. This policy imposes an undue burden on deaf bilingual students as compared with hearing bilingual students (who are not required to learn an additional non-native language to satisfy the CAS foreign language requirement). The current discriminatory policy must be changed.

Deborah Perry, CI, CT

GRS ’04

Certified Sign Language Interpreter