Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognitive Development by Morgan Gary;

Author:Morgan, Gary; [Morgan, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2020-01-30T14:59:44+00:00

5.Sign language acquisition in an atypical case: What Christopher can tell us

Christopher, born in January 1962, is an individual who has been institutionalized all his adult life because he is unable to look after himself. His case demonstrates an asymmetrical pattern between cognition and language with the latter spared in comparison with the former. On standardized measures of non-verbal cognition he scores between 40 and 75, while his verbal abilities are within the upper range of the scale (O’Connor & Hermelin, 1991; Smith & Tsimpli, 1995; and references therein).

Christopher’s profile becomes unique when one turns to language. Apart from English, his native language, Christopher speaks and/or understands twenty other languages to different degrees. His language learning abilities exhibit an extremely fast and accurate pattern mostly for languages which have a written form, although his ability to learn signed languages lacking written feedback, while weaker overall, still reveals a special talent for language compared to non-verbal abilities (Smith et al., 2011).

An in-depth investigation of his linguistic abilities reveals further asymmetries within his languages. Starting with English, Christopher’s mastery of morphology and vocabulary are intact, but his syntactic abilities show a diverse pattern. For instance, although subordination, in the form of relative and adverbial clauses, interrogatives and parasitic gaps, is clearly part of Christopher’s native grammar, topicalisation and left-dislocation are not. He does not use these constructions himself and rejects examples of them produced by others as ungrammatical. Other aspects of his language performance are also affected in apparently different ways. For instance, Christopher’s translations into English (from a variety of languages) occasionally fail to meet criteria of coherence and pragmatic plausibility; interpreting non-literal language can also be distressing. Smith et al. (2011) have interpreted these findings as reflecting a demarcation between structures which reflect higher and lower discourse-sensitivity. The contrast is then between the intact status of ‘formal’ aspects of Christopher’s English on the one hand, and discourse-related structures which are affected for independent reasons, such as his communication deficit, on the other. Christopher’s performance on comparable discourse-sensitive structures in his other L2s (e.g. Greek, French, Spanish) is also problematic, presumably for similar pragmatic reasons (Smith & Tsimpli, 1995).

BSL also fits this overall picture: Christopher’s mastery of the formal side of BSL – the morphology and syntax – is superior to his use of BSL for communication. Christopher’s performance on BSL becomes more impressive when one considers his severe apraxia, his limited visuo-spatial, kinaesthetic and social abilities. BSL was the first signed language he was exposed to, and as he was explicitly instructed in BSL (rather late considering the other languages he learned), it was clearly a ‘foreign’ language to him. Nevertheless, Christopher’s learning of BSL was within the same range of achievement as that of a comparison group of university undergraduates given the same syllabus.

In order to address possible critical period effects in Christopher’s acquisition of second languages we can exclude pragmatically-relevant syntactic structures, as these require the integration of macroparametric and microparametric properties with discourse-related information, external to the language core.

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