Gesture to Language to Speech

New Vocab.

• Grammar
• Gesture
• Benefit
• Success
• Develop

How would you sign Ferris Wheel?

On a visit to a first-grade class of deaf children, I watched as the teacher asked several pupils in turn what they liked best about the field trip they had taken the day before...The first child to respond pronounced haltingly the words "wheel Ferris," as she moved one hand with in a W handshape and the other in an F handshape of the manual alphabet, making vertical circles with them. One or two others, taking her lead when it was their turn to answer, repeated her signs with more or less intelligible pronunciations of "wheel Ferris." Then the teacher called on a boy in the back row just in front of me. He did not speak, though he moved his hands in alternating vertical circles as the others had done. But his hands were not letter formations. He held them both with his two fingers forward and bent-icons for seats and their movement to indexes to the Ferris Wheel's Rotation. -William Stokoe

Stokoe Said, "Human Language began as visible gesture and that the syntactic patterns of modern languages may have been derived from the inherently grammatical structure of iconic manual gestures." Do you agree with this? Can you think of examples why this is true or not?

ASL is a complete, unique language developed by deaf people, for deaf people and is used in its purest form by people who are Deaf. Being its own language, it not only has its own vocabulary, but also its own grammar that differs from English.

Signed English is a system to communicate in English through signs and fingerspelling. Signed English, in most cases, uses English grammar. The vocabulary is a combination of ASL signs, modified ASL signs, or unique English signs.

Since Stokoe said language went from gesture to language to speech, where do ASL and Signed English fit on this continuum?

We have learned that you do not need speech for language acquisition, but does a child learning Signed English benefit more than a child learning ASL? Since Signed English follows the grammatical structures of English, will that child have more success in the hearing world, rather than a child using ASL?

"The Difference between ASL and English Signs | Signing Savvy Blog | ASL Sign Language Video Dictionary." Signing Savvy Blog. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. .