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From: James.Womack@f14.n300.z1.fidonet.org (James Womack)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Dr. Supalla 10
Message-ID: <18726@bunker.isc-br.com>
Date: 15 Apr 91 04:23:00 GMT
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[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]

        As I conducted my research, I came to the conclusion that the
 MCE signs didn't make sense to the deaf children.  As a result they
 modified the signs and created their own linguistic structures that
 made sense to them and that conformed to the modality constraints on
 signed (versus spoken) languages.  Their sign system looked like ASL
 in that it was spatially-based but it was not ASL.  (Demonstration
 of the SEE 2 and ASL equivalents for the sentence: "He yells at
 her.")  The SEE 2 sign sy stem does not use directionality of verbs
 nor is it spacially-based like ASL.  SEE 2's morphology is also
 sequential in nature rather than simultaneous like ASL.

        One deaf child signed the sentence, "He yells at her" in a
completely different way than it would be signed in ASL or SEE 2.
(Demonstration)  His system was simultaneous and spatially-based like
ASL but different from ASL.  He had developed his own set of
linguistic rules and used them consistently.
Another child had a different sign system of his own.  It, too, was
simultaneous and spatially-based.  This child's set of rules was
different from SEE 2, ASL, and the first child's.  He had his own set
of rules.  In a class of eight students, there were eight different
sign systems that had been invented by the children in the class.  In
this particular mainstream program, there was not much opportunity
for the deaf children to interact with each other.  There was only a
total of 30 minutes a d ay where the children could interact in fact.
Socialization did not seem to be encouraged at the school.  As a
result, the children each developed their own sign system as a way of
making sense out of SEE 2.

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