The Emergence of Deaf Community in Nicaragua: "With Sign Language You Can Learn So Much" | 
 enlarge | Author: Laura Polich
Creator: Philip Lieberman
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 1732904
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
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Pages: 228
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 1563683245
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.9082097285
EAN: 9781563683244
ASIN: 1563683245
Publication Date: October 15, 2005
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Product Description
The sudden discovery of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) enthralled scholars worldwide who hoped to witness the evolution of a new language. But controversy erupted regarding the validity of NSL as a genuinely spontaneous language created by young children. Laura Polich’s fascinating book recounts her nine-year study of the Deaf community in Nicaragua and her findings about its formation and that of NSL in its wake.
Polich crafted The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua from her copious research in Nicaragua’s National Archives, field observations of deaf pupils in 20 special education schools, polls of the teachers for deaf children about their education and knowledge of deafness, a survey of 225 deaf individuals about their backgrounds and living conditions, and interviews with the oldest members of the National Nicaraguan Association of the Deaf.
Polich found that the use of a “standardized” sign language in Nicaragua did not emerge until there was a community of users meeting on a regular basis, especially beyond childhood. The adoption of NSL did not happen suddenly, but took many years and was fed by multiple influences. She also discovered the process that deaf adolescents used to attain their social agency, which gained them recognition by the larger Nicaraguan hearing society. Her book illustrates tremendous changes during the past 60 years, and the truth in one deaf Nicaraguan’s declaration, “With sign language you can learn so much.”
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Foreword Does Not Match the Book October 16, 2005
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
You may attribute the two star rating to the adverse impact of the Foreword. Here's why --This is a review not so much of the text as to the comments made by Professor Philip Lieberman (Brown University, Cognitive and Linguistic Science and Anthropology) in his foreword to The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua, by Laura Polich (Gallaudet University Press, Washington, DC 2005). As one of the implied targets of Prof. Lieberman's criticisms, I feel it is incumbent upon me to address at least his most extraordinary points.
Polich has undertaken the rather difficult task of endeavoring to document the emergence of a Deaf culture in Nicaragua by compiling anecdotal reports and fragmentary archival records. While I might differ with some of her analyses and while I am dismayed at her decision to overlook the entire Atlantic coast phenomenon, I nonetheless find her text to be an interesting read. I am not convinced that Lieberman can make the same claim only because some of his more glaring comments raise doubt, at least in my mind, that he actually read Polich's material.
What is clear is that Lieberman rejects Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar. The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language has been touted by several linguists, most notably Judy Kegl (University of Southern Maine, with a doctorate from MIT and a masters degree from Brown) and Ann Senghas (Columbia) as evidence of the validity of Chomsky's claims.
Dr. Lieberman writes:
"The myth that has developed concerning the spontaneous generation of Nicaraguan Sign Language derives from two dogmas held by a group of linguists trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The first is that human beings possess a genetic blueprint for a 'Universal Grammar."' The Universal Grammar is instantiated in some organ of the brain and specifies the syntax for every language that was, is, or will be. No one would argue with the claim that human beings possess the biological mechanisms necessary to acquire a language. The process takes somewhat longer than many linguists believe, at least ten years, but any 'normal' child raised in a 'normal' environment will learn to speak without any apparent effort. However, the theory of Universal Grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky claims that all of the details are, in computer terms, 'preloaded' and merely have to be activated by minimal exposure to a language.
"The second dogma at work in Nicaragua is the claim that a novel sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), spontaneously developed after a mass of deaf children were placed in a school for the deaf by the Sandinista government. This group of deaf children possessed only simple, varied home signs when they arrived at the school. According to Judy Kegl, Ann Senghas, and their colleagues, no deaf education or instruction in sign language had been available prior to the 1979 Sandinista revolution. They believe that the students created NSL and that this ostensibly is proof of the existence of Universal Grammar. The NSL story has been widely publicized and accepted as truth."
On the contrary, suggests Lieberman, Nicaraguan Sign Language has antecedents in Deaf education going back as far as 1946. The problem with Lieberman's assertion is that Kegl has never claimed that no deaf education had been available in Nicaragua prior to the 1979 political revolution. (I use the term "education" in the charitable sense. I have personally observed orally based classrooms where the level of education was, frankly abysmal.) Her claim is that after 1979, the revolutionary government was instrumental in dramatically increasing the enrollment of deaf students in the pubic special school system in Managua that had been established two years prior to the collapse of the Somozan dynasty. And, according to Kegl, this increase in enrollment coupled with the age demographic (young children in contact with adolescents) triggered the spontaneous emergence of a new sign language, with all the complexity that the term "language" implies. However, Kegl has never ruled out the possibility that other instructional programs for deaf people existed in Nicaragua in prior years. While neglect and even stigmatization of deaf children may have been the norm, nevertheless one would expect at least some examples of compassionate individuals, perhaps individually or in connection with the institutional Church, endeavoring somewhere in country to teach deaf children. To what degree this actually occurred prior to 1977 going back centuries, let alone decades is unknown. (Polich cites evidence of programs going back to 1946.) But, such programs continue to spring up from time to time, even today. (The small deaf class at the Convent St. Ines in Bilwi, where during the early 1990's the students had no exposure to Nicaraguan Sign Language, is a recent example. There were also sporadic instances of ineffective academic instruction in Bluefields prior to the establishment in 1995 of an intensive Nicaraguan Sign Language immersion program.) According to Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory, if the right conditions are present among a group of non-lingual children, language will emerge. And, among deaf children, if the right conditions are not present, those children are nonetheless going to attempt to communicate, and invariably they will generate a repertoire of gestures. Kegl does contend that whatever existed in Nicaragua prior to the 1980's appears to have had no bearing on the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language in the public deaf school system in Managua. Put another way, whatever happened in other communities or in prior years came to an evolutionary dead end.
Lieberman misquotes Polich to contend that, contrary to the MIT inspired dogma, "the chain of transmission was unbroken from 1946 to the present" (paraphrasing Polich's observation on p. 154.) Actually, Polich describes an earlier private institution where some deaf students were trained without benefit of any sign language. This chain of transmission was unbroken in the sense that there were a few students in the 1980's who had attended programs in the late 1970's and were therefore at least acquainted with students whose attendance dated back to the 1960's, and so forth in a continuous chain. If we stretch the point, of course, every one of us has met somebody who has met somebody, and so forth. However, in Chapter 7, after painstakingly trying and failing to connect this chain of transmission to the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language, Polich herself comes to the conclusion: "After all, the evidence suggests that a sign language developed and was adopted for standard use in Nicaragua in less than fifteen years." (p. 165).
Lieberman also describes two individuals as "catalyzing" outside influences in the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language:
"Among the earliest was Thomas Gibson, an American Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua, who taught an ASL class prior to the 1979 Sandinista revolution. His brief but effective instruction was recalled by many witnesses, and when he returned to the United States, he left behind several ASL manuals. Another catalyzing influence was the return of Adrian Perez, a deaf student who spent eight years in Spain in a boarding school where deaf students used sign language outside the classrooms."
According to Polich, however, Gibson was in Managua a mere three weeks and describes his Total Communication (a combined oral and signing educational methodology) as "fleeting and not sustained." (p. 162). Lieberman's suggestion that a few deaf students pouring over ASL picture glossaries left behind by Gibson were able to discern and adopt an ASL syntactic structure is ludicrous, and, more significantly, a notion rejected by Polich. Similarly, Polich herself discounts the role of Adrian Perez as a catalyzing influence since Perez' involvement postdates the emergence of the new language. (p. 162).
Awkwardly, Lieberman proceeds to challenge the prevailing linguistic dogma by speculating upon the political perspectives of it's authors:
"Noam Chomsky's politics, which are much in evidence among many linguists trained at MIT, may also have played a part in the uncritical attitude of the MIT group that attributed progress to the Sandinistas and their Cuban and Soviet support systems. However, the Sandinista revolution of 1979 did not lead to openness and a freeing of previous strictures that might have impeded deaf children signing to each other. In fact, contrary to the MIT linguists' account, progress toward achieving competency in sign language was set back when the Sandinistas appointed a Russian school director who forbade any use of gestures or sign language in the instruction of deaf students. Polich found that 'the pre-revolutionary schools in Managua were much more eclectic and open to sign language than the post-revolutionary schools for deaf children, which were severely, adamantly, and dogmatically oral' (see chap. 7). It was only after the director returned to the Soviet Union that NSL began to develop."
In the first place, it is presumptuous of Lieberman to ascribe any particular political philosophy to the various linguists engaged in this research. He also misses the point. To the best of my knowledge, the Sandinistan party platform took no position whatsoever in the sign language versus lipreading debate that has been consuming educators of deaf children since the nineteenth century. The Sandinistas did espouse the benefits of universal public education - a position upon which even Marxists do not hold a monopoly, by the way. In 1980, the revolutionary government, acting in concert with groups and individuals who were anything but "Sandinistan", embarked upon a national literacy crusade in an effort to radically improve the shameful state of literacy in their country. The swelling of the enrollment of deaf children in the public school system in Managua was but a minor corollary to this effort. (As an interesting side note, however, following the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas at the national level in 1990, ex-President Danial Ortega did take a personal interest in the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and former Vice-President Sergio Ramirez has become a strong advocate of the use of the indigenous sign language in the school system.)
Let's face it. Back when the bullets were flying, the intelligentsia behind the Sandinistan Revolution did not know anything about educating deaf children and, I daresay, did not lose any sleep over the matter. The Soviet educator who directed the deaf schools in Managua immediately after the revolution was indeed an adamant oralist. But, this only serves to support Kegl's arguments and Chomsky's theory. In the early 1980's, the education administrators were intent upon and apparently effective at isolating the deaf children from sign languages. Yet, a sign language emerged out of this student population anyway.
It is disappointing that Polich agreed to permit publication of Liberman's foreword to her otherwise interesting book. My advice: read the text, skip the foreword.
James Shepard-Kegl
Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc.
North Yarmouth, ME
October 16, 2005
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