ANGELIKA
Welcome to a new episode of Speaking of Language. I’m Angelika Kraemer, the Director of the Language Resource Center at Cornell University
SAM
and I’m Sam Lupowitz, the LRC’s Media Manager. We have Corrine Occhino with us today. Dr. Occhino is an Assistant Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University.
ANGELIKA
She gave a talk as part of our monthly LRC Speaker Series on what everybody should know about American Sign Language and American Deaf Culture.
SAM
You can watch her full talk on our YouTube channel and we are excited to extend our conversation here today.
ANGELIKA
Welcome to Speaking of Language, Corrine.
CORRINE
Thank you! Thank you so much for having me.
SAM
It’s our pleasure. We had a great time at your talk and we’d like to get into that a little bit more here on the podcast, but we like to start by asking about our guests’ background and path with languages. So, when and how did you start learning sign language?
CORRINE
Well, like many hearing people I discovered ASL as a language you can study in college. Well actually, I had a friend, my father’s friend whose wife was deaf in my childhood. So she would come to our house from time to time. But I think as a kid, I don’t know if kids really know how to process those kinds of things. I understood she was using her hands, but she also kind of talked, which we were all hearing, so. I didn’t think much of it until later on I realized “Oh, that’s what that was, right?”
I was already a linguistics student, declared from my undergrad, but I was thinking about going to grad school and for grad school we were supposed to choose a language of focus, right? That we’re going to write our papers on and get into. And I kind of looked around at the different options, I was at the University of Milwaukee, they had a great linguistics program, and it just so happened that we also had a great ASL program unbeknownst to me. It was kind of just a happy accident.
So I started taking ASL classes and I just really fell in love with it and as a graduate student I just realized more and more how the training I had received which was 100% focused on analyzing spoken languages didn’t work in so many ways for ASL. And I just found myself really puzzled by that, right? Because linguists love to talk about this idea of human language, like language with a capital L, like what does that mean? But I had only ever thought about language in an auditory mode.
So that really opened my mind a lot to what we mean when we talk about language and human language capacity. And sign languages in general really challenge a lot of the ways that many linguists think about language.
ANGELIKA
Oh, for sure. Yeah, that’s interesting. So, the film Coda just won best picture at the Oscars this year. Along with TV shows, commercials, and sports and news broadcasts, ASL is experiencing, as you called it, a “pop culture moment.” ASL is also one of the few languages nationally that has seen an increase in enrollment since 2016. As you pointed out in your talk, despite this growing popularity the hearing world really knows little about ASL, its role in deaf culture, its status as a real human language, or the daily frustrations that deaf ASL signers experience as they fight for access and inclusion in the hearing world. So, let’s take these points one by one. What should everybody know about ASL?
CORRINE
Well, that’s a really great question. I think the first thing is to recognize that ASL, or American Sign Language, is one of many sign languages, right? I think a lot of hearing people have this assumption either that sign language is universal, or that sign language should be universal, right? And so I think a lot of people have a misconception about that, whereas what we’re talking about primarily in the American context is American Sign Language which is unique from British Sign Language which is unique from Japanese Sign Language which are all completely different languages. So I think that’s probably the most important thing to know.
SAM
So, what role does American Sign Language play in deaf culture?
CORRINE
Language, as you probably have talked with other guests, is often at the center of culture. So language connects people in a way that not only allows people to have a bond of solidarity by using the same language but it’s also a way to capture historical or cultural or artistic knowledge that’s encapsulated within the knowledge of knowing that language. So, I would say in many ways ASL is at the center of deaf culture and deaf identity. And I think actually related to this idea of “What does deaf culture even mean?” I think knowing a language is what unites many people within the deaf community rather than the concept of deafness. So, really cultural deafness is about linguistic and cultural familiarity and a group more than it is about the way people hear and think about it which is a diagnosis of language loss or hearing loss.
ANGELIKA
You mentioned “language with a capital L” and that people always think about auditory languages. Can you talk a little more about ASL’s status as a real human language?
Eddie stopped here on Tuesday at 1:47pm –
CORRINE
Sure. So, ASL basically came on the scene in the mid-1800s when the first American School for the Deaf was founded in Hartford Connecticut and that school was the first place where deaf children could go and get a formal education. The people who helped set up that school were actually brought from France from the French School for the Deaf that was established well before that. And so, French deaf educator brought French sign language to the United States as a tool for pedagogy and instructions, so these deaf kids from all over the Northeast to come to this deaf school and they brought with them various language experience they might have had home sign situation where they were the only deaf person their family and to communicate with families it would kind of make up signs in a very Idiosyncratic to communicate with primarily local family members or it could have been the exact opposite. They could have been coming from a place like Martha's Vineyard which I'm sure the audience knows where Martha's Vineyard is but what they might not know is that at one point in time Martha's Vineyard was a center for deaf culture in the United States because there was a fairly High incidence of hereditary, a sign language of emerged in Martha's Vineyard that was used really throughout the islands and regions. So this american deaf school really became this I guess Melting Pot for language and kind of cultural emergence. So ASL comes from that contacts but more broadly it's used throughout the US and English speaking parts of Canada so it's a fairly broadly used language it's also one of the most popular second language in terms of people who are deaf that no a different sign language as their primary sign language much of the same way that English is a very popular second language for people who speak other languages throughout the world. A little bit of lingua-franca you might say.
SAM
You brought up the Martha's Vineyard Community during your talk and I had forget when or where I read about that but that's it fascinating and and an amazing thing to not know existed until you know whatever my thirties or it's just one of those things that's not shared while we are taught widely I feel and it's so interesting.
CORRINE
Yeah no I totally agree and I think in a lot of ways like many minoritized groups, their history and culture often isn't taught in more mainstream school programs. So most people don't know very much about Deaf culture at all that's not included in public school in the United States.
ANGELIKA
You know and I do have to say I've been thinking about this a lot actually since your talk growing up in Germany is the secondary educational system is very different in Germany than what it is here, and there have always been specialized schools for differently-abled students. I can't tell you how old I was when I interacted with somebody who was not able in the same way that I am, which blows my mind when you think about it you know. And I think you mentioned when you were on campus to that oftentimes people only start thinking about people who communicate differently once they first encounter somebody who you know can speak as difficulty hearing, and I think that's a big problem for education and for language classes, but it's it's sad how ignorant we are.
CORRINE
We are and I think this kind of goes back to what you were asking about with the movie Coda and how important that representation is in in pop culture or in medium or generally because it's that visibility that allows hearing people to think about what the challenges might be that deaf people face on a daily basis in terms of access and terms of inclusion in terms of just very basic things that we take for granted in a world that structured for hearing right. So I think when people see a movie like Coda it's very eye-opening for them because they may be never thought about a deaf family with the hearing daughter or they may be never thought about you know what that might be like to be the only deaf people in a community and trying to be part of a community what that looks like so I totally agree with you it's not ideal.
SAM
We were touching on this topic already. Are there other sorts of daily frustrations that deaf ASL sign years experience as they fight for Access and inclusion in the hearing world.
CORRINE
I think there are a lot of different ways that access and inclusion impact deaf lives. One that I mentioned in my talk was this idea that it wasn't until just 2020 when the pandemic hit that the National Association for the deaf sue the US government to provide ASL interpreters for emergency broadcast about this Global pandemic and the National Association of the deaf won in District Court and so the you know the court said that the government had to provide interpreters to you know give ASL access to the deaf community in this time of global crisis and thankfully then the Biden Administration took that a step further and they've been the first Administration to hire a full-time set of American Sign Language interpreters who are on staff at the White House for all of their press briefing so I would say you know that is one huge example very recently of you know trying to get access but also even fighting for captioning I mean you would not believe how resistant to captioning hearing people are and I don't understand this because as a hearing person I use captioning all the time even before being part of the deaf Community. If I watch a show that's a non-standard English dialect from you know BBC maybe sometimes I turn it on or sometimes if you're in a crowded loud environment you know and like at the airport or something and you want to read the captions but very often you know when deaf people ask you know only want to have what they call open captioning at the movie theater right so there is closed captioning and open captioning. And open captioning is just you know the captioning is there you don't have to turn it on it's kind of part of the movie but usually what happens is deaf people are given these really clunky terrible glasses that they have to put on over their own glasses or whatever where they can read the caption that are kind of superimposed than on the screen. People don't want to see captions on the movie that they're paying see so in Rochester where I used to live with this big deaf Community they have a lot of showings of open caps were they advertising say this Friday at 6 o’clock open captioning of Coda for whatever movie but time and time again I've seen that deaf people try to say like could we just have like a regular captioning all the time and hearing people are really angry about providing captioning at all and I don’t understand it all. So you would think it's a very basic thing to provide right like captions don't seem like a big ask and yet it's huge. Or even for talks, right, like when I give talks for an academic Community I make it really clear to the people that I'm giving the talk for that there has to be captioning right before my video gets posted anywhere it has to be captioned but I would say a conservative estimate 75%- 80% of academic talks I see have no captioning. So that means if you go online at your desk person you're trying to access information even in your own field there's no accessibility because people don't want to take the time to caption their videos.
ANGELIKA
We have a long way to go. You also spoke about ASL's roots in deaf education about the fact that language deprivation is still a very real problem for Deaf children in the US. Can you explain that a little more for our listeners.
CORRINE
Yes absolutely. So the best way I think to explain the concept of language deprivation is to think about how typical acquisition works for here in children which is a child is born into a family regardless of whatever language that family speaks a hearing child is born to hearing parents the minute they come out those parents are talking to that baby and that baby has full access to the sounds and the intonations and the phonemes that are coming out of their parents mouths and their brain automatically starts connecting the dots and finding patterns and learning language. But when a deaf child is born into that environment by the virtue of the fact that they can't hear if their parents are talking at them right not really to them, but ask them they're getting either a very degraded signal if they have residual hearing at all or maybe no signal at all other than kind of the visual mouth movements right but none of the things that we would really consider to be the core of for example English vocabulary or prosody or phonology or any of those things. On the flip side of that, is when a deaf baby is born into a hearing family, they have the exact same kind of experience that hearing children born to deaf parents have which is the minute they come out and their parents are holding them the parents are signing to them and the child is being immersed in a visual language where they can start seeing patterns being and shapes understanding prosody all of these same things that we take for granted in typical language development that can happen for deaf children and who are born who are lucky enough really to be born with deaf parents and have that immediate access to a full language that's only conservatively probably less than 10% maybe 8% percent of children are born into death signing families which means more than 90 per-cent of deaf children are born into hearing families who are usually woefully uninformed about Deaf culture or sign languages and more than that I think that what happens is that there's a fear that sets in right there's a fear that comes from a hearing Centric view of the world that assumes that having a deaf child is a problem is something to be worried about, is something to be sad about, and so what those parents are thinking many times is like how do I make this child here how do I give them access to spoken language but what we know is that you know Cochlear implants or speech therapy all of these are great but they don't substitute for full access to a language from birth right and so the kind of thing that generally starts to happen because many of these deaf children with hearing families don't have access to full access to a language in those early parts of the years is that we see what we called language deprivation and language deprivation is the lack of access to a full language right and so they don't have the opportunity to build those connections and all of the things that go along with learning language right and it's very very hard to catch after that right. If those children who are deaf born to hearing families ever get access to sign language at all and often doesn't happen until school age when they enter a public school system, then they can be provided with an interpreters or be in a mainstream classroom with other deaf kids. At five years old, that's a really long gap between first and 5 to have access to a full language so language deprivation results from that kind of a circumstance in and it's still a real problem in the deaf community mostly because of uninformed or ill-informed parents and and honestly providers right doctors, speech therapists, and and people who also have a very hearing Centric view of deafness as a deficit rather than if something that is actually something to be celebrated as just part of regular you know human diversity right the only thing that really is the problem is the fact that we've built a world that is not accessible it's not really hearing itself.