Visual-centered narratives of the deaf

LINGUISTICS AND EDUCATION 2~ 213-229 (1990)

Visual-Centered Narratives of the Deaf MADELINE M. MAXWELL University o f Texas

Some deaf children produce discourse--signed and written--tflat is incomprehensible to hearing adults. This article explores aspects of these texts that indicate a structure of visual images and scenes, producing visual-centered narratives. The data for this study are derived from several sources, from both children and adults. Signed data sources include a preschool class at a school for the deaf, a language assessmentsession,informal conversations and stories told by deaf adults, and a television production by the National Theatre of the Deaf. Written samples were collected both from children who sign and children who are educated to rely wholly upon oral communication. Visual-centered narratives may originate as a btologlcal propensity to relate to the world visually, which has been developed rhetor/cal/y in Deaf Culture. Deafness causes individuals to experience the world visually, and this is fundamentally interrelated 1o their language and culture. Visual-centered narratives may be structures which start with a biological condition and develop culturally into a complex linguistic discourse form.

Deaf children often produce discourse that is incomprehensible to hearing adults. The child may appear to sign " a bunch o f structureless words." Both children who sign and children who do not may produce writing with the same apparent absence o f structure. This article explores aspects o f these texts that indicate previously unrecognized structures o f visual images and scenes (rather than a structure such as a thematic sequence) producing visual-centered narratives. The data behind this claim are derived from several sources, both from children and adults, including spontaneous and rehearsed examples. Signed data sources include a preschool class at a school for the deaf, sessions in which hearing teachers were taking language samples from deaf children for the purposes o f assessment and teaching, informal conversations between hearing adults This work was supported in part by the following grants: National Institute of Health Grant #NS09811 and National Science Foundation Grant BNS-76-12866 to Dr. Ursula Bellugi of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; University of Arizona Foundation Grant # 1016-0777-39, the University of Texas University Research Institute, and International Business Machines, Inc., Project QUEST. Note to reader: Within this article there are superscripts, numbers which pertain to End Notes which occur at the end of the text. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Madeline M. Maxwell, Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712. 213

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and deaf children inside and outside the classroom, informal conversations of deaf teenagers outside the classroom, a number of unrehearsed informal stories told by deaf adults, and a television production by the National Theatre of the Deaf. In addition, written samples were collected both from children who sign and children who are educated to rely wholly upon oral communication. Those providing writing samples varied from 9 to 19 years of age. Observations were made in numerous classrooms in a variety of different schools. Data were originally collected in several settings in four states for a variety of other research projects before being used for the current exploratory purpose. BACKGROUND A survey of the literature dealing with deaf individuals shows two strongly divided directions. On the one hand, there are descriptions of American Sign Language and Deaf Culture in a few journals and books. Quite separated, for the most part, is a larger literature dircctcd to the education and habilitation of deaf children in other journals and books. In general, the researchers involved in these enterprises are different. More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and most children born to deaf parents are hearing (Quigley & Kretschmer, 1982). Thus, deaf people themselves are seldom in the position of overseeing educational services for deaf children (Moulton, Roth, & Tao, 1987), and most parents of deaf children have no previous experience with deaf individuals. Few teachers of deaf ~hildren are themselves deaf, and the number has declined since the early days of organized education (Vernon, 1984). Thus, there is no automatic inclusion of Deaf Culture in the education of deaf children or of teachers of deaf children (e.g., Rutherford, 1985). There is, indeed, in many quarters, active resistance to such influences. In particular, there is considerable objection to the use of American Sign Language in the education of deaf children, and a strong minority of educators and parents who object to the use of any signs at all (whether combined with speech or not) in the communication of deaf children. Consequently, deaf children do not naturally observe many (in some cases, any) deaf adults in the course of their growing up. Indeed, educational policy in the United States has been, since the passage of P.L. 94-142 and its interpretation by the states, to normalize heating-impaired children's education as much as possible, and to rely upon special services only to the extent necessary; therefore, deaf children may have no contact with other deaf children unless they are assigned to special classes (e.g., Commission on Education of the Deaf, 1988; Raimondo & Maxwell, 1987). American Sign Language (ASL) grew independently of the education of'deaf children, which has always focused on mastery of English, perhaps even in spite of education (Lane, 1984). It has a grammar and a set of discourse rules distinct from English (e.g., Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Wilbur, 1987). Most teachers of the

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deaf, who are hearing, engage in different sorts of sign expression, referred to variously as Total Communication, Sign English, Manual Communication, Simultaneous Communication, and so on. Such teachers sign along with their speech. The signs they use are borrowed from ASL or made up according to several systems of rendering English in signed form (e.g., Wilbur, 1987). These systems do not follow the grammar or discourse rules of ASL, because they are viewed as clarifications of or supports to English speech (e.g., Bornstein, Saulnier, & Hamilton, 1976). Most deaf children attend classes with teachers who communicate using one of these systems (Jordan, Gustason, & Rosen, 1979; Quigley & Kretschmer, 1982). Other teachers of the deaf, those working with children who rely solely upon oral communication or those who do not accept the use of signs, do not sign at all. Even teachers who are deaf themselves may not have learned to sign at all when they were growing up, or may not sign ASL. Traditionally, ASL had been said to pass from the few children of deaf parents or the occasional deaf employee to the children, but there is no tradition of teaching ASL or other aspects of Deaf Culture to deaf children. ASL Discourse A number of authors have discussed the importance of vision and ASL to Deaf Culture (e.g., Erting, 1985; Padden & Itumphries, 1988; Stokoe, 1980). Padden and Humphries (1988, p. 1 I0) claim that " . . . the biological characteristic of not hearing is intimately bound up with Deaf people's culture and language." Ce.rtainly one of the questions of interest to linguists and psychologists has always concerned the role of vision in ASL (e.g., Klima & Bellugi, 1979). The visual qualities of ASL provide rich resources for description. The ability to hold a sign while another is made or to see two signs at once, even signs of two different individuals, leads to some artistic and playful overlay. The ability to coordinate the complexity of ASL locative description requires the organization and structure of space (Fischer, 1975; Frishberg, 1975; Newport, 1981), which is cognitively demanding, apparently leading to rather late (not until age 5 or so) development of the linguistic expression of action (Ellenberger & Steyaert, 1978). ASL Group Narrative Rutherford (1985) described a group narrative constructed by 10 different signers: The scene involving ten members of the NDT [National Theater of the Deaf] ensemble starts with the image of the rolling sea and develops into a dramatic" rescue by helicopter of a pilot downed in a storm-tossed sea during wartime. At stage left we see a lighthouse with its beam revolving regularly, sweeping light out over the sea. One actor is the sea churning with large crests and troughs. At stage right an aircraft carrier emerges and a plane takes off over the sea. It dramatically

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commands the sky and swoops left. Suddenly, a battleship appears and its cannon' fires at the plane. The plane is hit, the pilot ejects, and parachutes into thesea below. The abandoned plane continues in a wide arc and crashes in the distance. The pilot is bobbing on the sea when from stage left, a rescue helicopter appears. Two actors comprise the 'copter, one the craft itself, the other its rescue basket. The basket is lowered, picks up the pilot, and reels him into the helicopter, which then flies off to return to land. (pp. 145-146) After the rescue of the pilot, the group narrative moves beyond the literal to the metaphoric. The sea becomes more tumultuous. The actor's signed narrative tells of a fierce storm with howling wind and relentless rain, crackling lightning and roaring tht/nder. Then the storm breaks; the sky clears, and the violence of the storm is transformed into the new hope of a sunrise created by eight of the actors. From one side of the stage comes a bird that flies center and alights calmly on the gently rolling sea. (pp. 147-148) Several individuals continue their "lines" while others express theirs. For example, the waves continue surging (one signer) while the boat moves forward (another signer) while the helicopter flies in (two other signers). The signs are of referents, which move, and their placement on the stage is mimic, so that people actually walk with their signs instead of staying in place as in normal conversation. This group narrative can be seen as a sequence of visual images, composed of form and movement. Although there is spoken translation throughout the National Theater of the Deaf television program, the speech that accompanies visual.centered presentations is like a list of objects: " w a t e r . . . l i g h t h o u s e . . , aircraft c a r t i e r . . , fighter p l a n e . . , b a t t l e s h i p . . , p a r a c h u t i s t . . , h e l i c o p t e r . . , the r e s c u e . . , storm c l o u d s . . , w i n d . . , l i g h t n i n g . . , t h u n d e r . . , s u n r i s e . . . peace." Such narratives contain beginning, middle, and end, and some such narratives contain sentences that look like topic-centered narrative reports; the primary structure of such a narrative, however, is the sequence of images composed of form and movement, producing a visual-centered, or imagic, narrative. The basic sentence pattern is topic-comment, where the topic or the comment may be exaggerated outside the conventions of the language into mime. This example comes from a group of professional actors, yet the scene is introduced by the line, "When we were children trying to develop language meaningful to us, we invented many Stories like this." According to Rutherford (1985, p. 144), " a m o n g the folk group of Deaf children," the group narrative is "one of the most commonly found forms of storytelling." VISUAL-CENTERED NARRATIVES Many, though certainly not all, of the narratives collected from individual adults exhibit a similar sequence of visual images. For example, One lady, telling a brief story of a prank played in school, details the arrangements of the children in the

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class, the affects of the perpetrator and victim, and the facial expression of surprise and chagrin of the victim. A father, telling the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" to his young daughter and other adults, includes more elements of mime by moving around the room to place the wolf "behind a tree," Little Red leaning all the way to the ground to pick flowers, the wolf running in panic from Grandmother's house, and so on. Such a story is complex, ~ind he includes all the standard episodes of the lraditional tale. The content of his story focuses on the visual images of Little Red walking along unconcerned, including such elements as rearranging her basket, picking flowers, gazing at the trees, smelling the flowers, the wolf salivating over Red and her basket, watching her from behind several trees, leaning out to see her and ducking back, and so forth. The audience is thus told what the story looks like in a visual-centered, or imagie, narrative. Other visual-centered texts present a description or a transformation. Texts like these have been discussed as poems and "art sign" because of "the heightened use of language" (e.g., Klima &Bellugi, 1979). For example, the National Theater of the Deaf actors present poems composed by deaf children. The English versions of some of the poems are: Dreams Cowboys and Indians circle in my head When I dream .Twisted joints No teeth Looking at the world through glass eyes The performance of these poems is actually a combination of ASL and English. In the first one, for example, the sign glossed as DREAM~ is not the usual sign that looks like a thought wandering off into space but a sign that means more precisely eye opening up in the mind or seeing in the mind. Cowboys is signed with one hand and Indians with the other, then the two hands circle around the head as the eyes look up, meaning circle in visions in my head. Then "in my head when I dream" is signed as an English sequence, using the usual sign translated as dream. The second poem is performed as the sign TWlSTmade at each knee and elbow, with the signer holding her body twisted after the sign is made. She signs "NO TEETtl TOOTIILESSMOUTtt" and closes her mouth as if she has no teeth. Each line is cumulative, so that in the last line, the actor has twisted joints and a toothless mouth to which she adds glass eyes. While Padden and Humphries (1988) point out the importance of aspects of sound and rhythm in ASL poetry, the rhetorical structure of these presentations is essentially of images, form, and movement. In that way, they are like the individual scenes of the longer narrative (with a greater emphasis on aesthetics).

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Children's Visual-Centered Narratives Some children's single-author narratives display many of the same elements as the group narrative and the adult visual-centered, imagie, narratives. Three examples of young children from different contexts will serve as illustrations. The first child, age 6, has been asked to talk with two college seniors who are preparing to become teachers of the deaf. Their goal is to obtain a language sample for evaluation} The second child, age 7, is telling adults she has known since infancy (who happen to be linguistic researchers) about recent events in her life. The last two children, age 6, are in the same preschool class and are taking their turns at telling a story the teacher has told them before. The first child, age 6, in talking about the movie, Star Wars., describes the different characters--R2D2, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker--and names some of them with metonymic sign names or fingerspelling, usually after describing them. Then he details the major scenes--the fights, with explosions in different directions, the menace of Darth Vader to smaller characters--in terms of what he saw in the movie. Thus he produces, through the use of storytelling, linguistic features of ASL, and through the use of mime and exaggeration, what the movie scenes looked like. The adults collecting the language sample are sitting on the floor as the child stands in front of them. It is obvious to them and to him that they do not understand him very well. The child seems to add spelling the names of the characters and additional pantomime in an effort to help the adults understand him. To them, a great deal of the time he appears to be signing "a bunch of structureless words." As he signs, the teachers, who are auditory, try to assign the child's talk s&quences a label, as if he were trying to describe things because he does not know the English referents and they need to supply them, instead of looking for the sequence of images in forms and movements. Like the rescue story, the Star Wars story elaborates the topic-comment structure of the sentences and focuses on visual scenes and images. Instead of following the child's topic, which they do not understand well, the teachers ask him such questions as when his birthday is, questions he can answer briefly with responses they understand better. At first the child keeps trying to tell them about Star Wars characters and actions, but he gradually gives up his visual-centered discourse and tries to answer their questions. In the classroom, teachers sometimes look at a child signing and try to say a spoken word translation for each sign in sequence, even looking away in concentration on what the child might "try to be saying." Some can be seen repeating the signs children use in mystification at what they might want to communicate. The child and the adult may both act as if the comprehension problem lies in the transmission of signs or speech or grammar. The result is much recoding and repetition. Often the symbols are perfectly well comprehended but the meaning is not. Children, like the boy telling about Star Wars, often react to hearing adults' confusion by slowing down, pantomiming, or fingerspelling: in effect, by becoming more visual both in transmission and in content or by giving up. In

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fact, adults may understand the signs but still fail to comprehend the discourse., Many teachers in the classroom, like these teachers in training, may avoid conversation that they do not tightly control. One result is that an environment intended to center on language teaching may provide few opportunities for children to express themselves. And many of the Opportunities that they do have are stifled, just as this attempt to assess the child's language misfired as the child adjusted to the assessors" inability to keep up with him. The scene is reminiscent of the one Michaels (1981) described in observing that when teachers miscomprehend because some hearing children bring a different narrative structure to the classroom, the behavior they use to try to help the child talk appropriately actually stifles the child and gives the message that the child is inadequate and disvalued. As these heating adults try to understand this discourse, they translate the signs they grasp into English speech, almost a list of nouns and gerunds: "Star Wars. many, many p o p p i n g . . . 55 55 what?--oh toys, toys . . . . black man? Oh, talking about Darth Vader, b i g . . , toy m a n y . . , name? woman fight . . . . table - oh, is that like the p l a n e . . , mean m a n ? . . , s h o o t . . . " They do not know how to structure what the child produces, but what they say is similar to the spoken translation accompanying the rescue story ( " w a t e r . . . lighthouse. . . ."). T h e S t a r W a r s story the child is telling, like the rescue story, is more complex and informative than the speech translation of nominal sign reveals. The second examples, from a girl age 7, are told to adults who are native or experienced signers, who understand her easily. B o t h stories follow prompts from the child's mother to tell the researchers about her recent activities as instances of the standard parental directive to tell an interesting personal narrative upon seeing people who have not been visited for some time. In the first story the child recounts a recent trip to Universal Studios. The story follows the sequence of events and sights the family experienced at the park. The general structure is for the child either to name a topic--a referent or site, such as the J a w s exhibit--or to start with an English sentence giving the setting, and then to describe the action. For example, she signs in great detail how they made their way through the grounds: The scene starts with the statement that they stood in line an extended length of time, about two hours, and changes as the family goes from exhibit to exhibit. First, she describes the milling and desultory wandering of individuals waiting. Finally they weave slowly uphill to get on a big open bus and then meander slowly uphil ! gazing about. The bus stops and mother alights. The child and her dad see a small toad and a big huge fish off to the side . . . . T h e J a w s exhibit story opens with people hearing a loud noise like a car crash and looking up. Suddenly a shark comes crashing down in a dive and swims around in a circle ominously. The vehicle moves around and they see Jaws, with its huge gaping mouth. Then the girl describes the huge tail raised high in the air. There's a fake boy fishing above the shank. When the shark crashes that huge tail

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down, the vehicle teeters on its side as it steers past the giant shark's mouth. Then there's another loud noise caused by the swell from the shark's tail, and cold water all around swamps the bus and splashes everyone on the bus as another bus comes toward them from the other direction. The splashing water, tilting bus, and oncoming bus are all signed so that they are articulated in space at the same time. She ends the story with a comment that her parents were funny when they were scared by the shark and funny when they were all wet. The story uses the same kind of combinations of sign and mime for narrative effect that the actors use in the.National Theater of the Deaf rescue story. It is a well formed and clever story, using the elements of surprise quite well. Linguistically, it follows the pattern of topic signs plus comment and extending sign movements beyond the usual conversational space into near mime. Unlike the National Theater of the Deaf story, though, the child stays in one place to tell the story, sitting on a couch. The second story is also signed while the child sits on a couch. This story is set in the child's home and has a sad ending. When asked if she has any animals at home, she responds (in simultaneous sign and speech, abbreviated sss), "No but I saw one lizard in my home. I have one snake." The story she tells is a mixture of simultaneous signed and spoken language and signed language alone. The child is excited to tell the story about two hamsters who have gotten out of their cage and lost in the bathroom cupboard: The story opens with the hamsters escaped for the first time. The child moves through the house searching her parents' bedroom, moving upstairs and down, opening the bathroom cupboard. "At first she can't see anything inside the cabinet. Nothing there. She looks up. She waits. She puts down food and water for the hamster and waits some more, with her chin resting on her fist. Finally, one ventures out of the cabinet and she catches it. After waiting all that time to catch the hamsters, she puts them back in their cage, closes it, and fastens it with tape. But one climbs out anyway. She catches it but leaves the cage open. One gets out again. Not the brown o n e - - i t stays in the cage. It just stays there and doesn't get out. But the white one does leave the cage again. So she searches for it in the bathroom. The hamster runs all around the room trying to get away. She loses sight of it. She asks herself, "Where did it go?" She waits, catches it, puts it back in the cage only to have them both get lost . . . . The description of repeated escapes to the bathroom, repeated searching, and attempts to tape the cage securely continues until the hamsters are discovered dead. There's a funeral, and the child's sister buries the brown hamster while her brother buries the white one. She puts a cross on the grave so nobody steps on it. She tells her father he would stomp on it when working in the yard. This story, too, is a sequence of visual images, focusing on how the hamsters and people move, where the hamsters are glimpsed, how the people try to catch them, and how the people act as they are setting out enticements. The movement and forms are very descriptive as the scenes are constructed.

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The final two examples are of a preschool class telling the story of the lion and the mouse. The children have been told this story often by a teacher who is a wonderful storyteller. She tells it in simultaneous speech and sign, alternating with sign alone and mime, switching from English to ASL to mime and back. For example, she says (sss), "The little mouse was walking through the forest." Then she says (sign only), "MOUSE WALK-SAUNTER [+durative]." Then she repeats (sss), "The little mouse was walking," and then ASL, "WALK-SAUNTER [+durative]," ihen "through the forest"(sss). She follows this pattern for the whole story. "The little mouse inadvertently walks across the sleeping lion's nose and wakes him up. She says (sss), "The lion was sleeping." Then she says (sign only), "LION SLEEP, SNORE [+durative]" and mimes exaggerated yawning with 9 loud snoring. Then she moves her hands back to the space where she signed the little mouse walking and repeats that sentence (sss) and adds (sss) "not pay attention." Then she switches signs from WALK-SAUNTER, uttered with 9 hands with the fingers together and stretched out flat, to another sign made with the index and middle finger of just one hand (LEGS). To sign, "(mouse) WALK 9 ACROSS-NOSE," she actually moves her fingers across her own nose (with herself in the role of the lion). Then she mimes the sleeping lion wiggling its nose and waking up to spot a mouse between its eyes. For storytelling the teacher uses a set of illustrations laminated on cards and shuffles them as she goes through the story, showing the pictures around either before or after she recounts that part of the story. Another element of her storytelling is the modulation of her voice and her. signs to render dialogue character appropriately. The mouse has a high squeaky speaking voice and high, tiny signs. The lion has a deep, rumbly speaking voice and big, gruff signs. The teacher ends that story by relating (sss) the events to the moral: "The mouse promised to help, and he helped, and the lion is free." The teacher frequently tells a number of such stories to the children; the typical pattern is for the children to sit in their chairs around a half-moon-shaped table with the teacher across the table from them in the center of the half moon. Once the children have been told the story a few times, they often sign or speak along with parts of it or react in anticipation to a funny or scary part. After she has told the story, often involving commentary with the children on an aspect such as how silly the mouse is or when the children have seen something related to the story, the teacher asks for volunteers to take her seat, use her illustrations, and tell the story. The children eagerly vie for turns. The children tend to use the illustrations to prompt their memories and help them produce the story. They are clearly imitative of the teacher. The parts of the stories that they reproduce are interesting for the topic of this article. Typically, the children reproduce the first part of the story and the highlights in much greater detail than the rest of the story, and they typically leave out less important parts, passing over pictures altogether or simply pointing to parts of the pictures. In this session, the children use the pictures as guides to scenes: The children study each picture, then

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recreate the teacher's story as visual information to accompany the picture. Most reproduce the first sentence of the story in simultaneous speech and sign English, such as "The little mouse was walking through the forest." and then the ASL translation, "MOUSE WALK-SAUNTER[+durative]." The other key scenes of this story that most children produce are the mouse walking on the lion's nose, the lion capturing the mouse, the mouse walking away from the lion (after bargaining to come to the lion's rescue), the lion's capture in a net trap, and the mouse's gnawing through the rope to release the lion. Except for the first sentence of the story, though, almost all the rest of the story is told only in ASL, and focuses on the visual scenes and actions. (There is one exception to that generalization for these children and for some other deaf children: The dialogue of stories, if it is told, is usually told in English (sss)). The rest of the story follows the sequencing of visual images of the National Theater of the Deaf rescue story. Even though the children follow the sequence of the teacher's story, their stories are not internally sequenced in thematic form. Their stories are visual and imagic. Written Visual-Centered Narratives

Some children also write using visual-centered narrative structure. Signing adults read some of these passages as if they are partial transcriptions of ASL, similar to the spoken translation of the Star Wars story or the spoken accompaniment to the National Theater of the Deaf rescue story. The presumption in such cases is that the child has written down the labels for the main texical signs and added a few elements of English grammar since it is a written form. ASL transfer is not the only issue in deaf children's written English, of course, and some children do not know sign. Two bilingual deaf educators were asked to comment on and classify texts written by profoundly deaf fourth-grade children into groups they thought represented deaf children's abilities. They identified texts that were "ASL written down," texts that showed little if any evidence of ASL influence and poor enough English that they found it hard to interpret, and texts that were such poor English that they felt at a loss trying to interpret them at all. Three of the texts illustrate the range of ability of writing in English and of ASL influence for some deaf children of this age. The children were writing in response to the question, "What's your favorite movie?" or "What's the most exciting thing that you have seen in real life or on TV?", tasks that were typical for them in school. Heavy ASL Influence: I got a excitied got Three Wheel I Bugged to my mom I Buy Three Wheel . My morn said noway I said Why because you are to young. I said OH OH. my morn said 10 old years I said ok Wait to Christmas I exciting Wait I play with rny horse and dogs run. my mom said if Works Hard in farm you can get Three Wheel Christmas I patient Works Hard in the farm. I want Hard.' My morn no got Three

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Wheel. I Why Why I did work Hard in the farm. my mom you lousy work in the farm no no no I not did lousy work Hard in the farm. I run away out of door. because my mom is lie. my mom I not lie to you. I yes yes becamuse you said no get three Wheel I mad at my mom. my morn Ha Ha you mad at me! I shupup to my morn beamuse you no get three wheel, my mom want you go stay in room. I said noway, ok you Best Stop you out go to work Hard in the farm I said no because you said no get Three Wheel my mom said want you stay in room? I said tell no. I ok. I can go to work. I said what I work Kind. my room said to go got Hay to horse He and She eat ttay. I said ok. have to be tworrun to have Christmas. I sleeping late This morning I go to Tree Christmas I looked I exciting "I yell yell my morn said fooling to me I has new three Wheel I excited excited my mom said fooled fooled tta Ha ttaH! I mad at my mom becamuse my morn said fooled, my mom said no no get a Three Wheel it Why

Little ASL Influence and Poor English: My favorite movie is "Poltergeist" because 1 love to watch mystery movie! there have many freak out thing that I love to hear! it really scary to met There talked about funeral inside the ground and a man make a home on funeral and family bought the place and spirits from under ground a girl can hear from them them really too scary! they leave that house and that house gone also they arrived from motel and they kicked that T.V. Then girl lost her power and her bird dead by girl so they are so fed up! 'Z

Virtually No ASL Transfer and Poor English: My favorite is movie "V." I saw of eyes arms any body fire plane, one girl afraid a fire bomb one boy barve boy tell to boy about fire bomb saw dirty and left rocks I saw a white rock and boy is dream boy out see to plane if not has go to get boy hunting for plane. I saw lizard and saw one girl close door afraid for fire bomb. one boy ran saw girl get friend and afraid fire long bomb saw of eyes and ann all body get blood. A l t h o u g h the first two texts both show more facility with English, it is clear that all three writers were responding to the visual elements o f what they had seen. (Of course, they did not hear the movies.) The first text is essentially a dialogue with alternating turns; it was easily signed b y the bilingual adults in A S L , using the A S L c o n v e n t i o n for shifting shoulders and orientation to indicate speakers, with great certainty expressed about their interpretations. The second text starts out to be a justification o f the claim that the movie was scary, but the second two-thirds o f the text provide a chronological narrative. The third text elicited m u c h speculation from the readers, who were not at all sure what it meant.

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The deaf educators thought the texts were representative of the deaf writing they had read over the years. They both made comments to the effect that they could interpret some parts of the texts only because they had read so many such texts and talked with so many deaf people about their writing over the years. They stressed that they could not be sure of the meaning of texts like Poltergeist and "V" because of the writing, and that they might change their minds about the meaning i.f they looked at the texts another time. They were comfortable with the production of visually effective scenes from the written texts and made the assumption that if they could see the texts signed, they would be co.mpetent, although they were not competent as written. Both said several times that they were thinking about what the writer might have seen. They did not comment on the fact that in the texts certain individuals are unidentified, motives and themes are not supplied, and so forth. The other strategy they used to interpret the texts was a metaphorical strategy. Bob Alcorn (personal communication, November 29, 1989) has collected cases such as one where a deaf child wrote, "I like fly kite alike rocket." A hearing educator interpreted the sentence to mean the child liked to fly his kite fast or to fly a kite that was shaped like a rocket, but the deaf child meant he liked to fly his kite so high that it became small and finally disappeared out of sight, the way a rocket looks on a televised launch, taking off and disappearing into the distance as the TV frame keeps shifting higher and higher. One of the educators had seen Poltergeist, while the other had not. Both of them interpreted "that housc gone" to mean "disappeared without a trace" and one used the sign DISAPPEARin the distance while the other one used the sign DISAPPEARunder the horizon. Both provided scenes based on: (1) funeral inside the ground; (2) man/family make a home on funeral; (3) spirits from under ground a girl can hear from them; (4) them really too s c a r y . . . [family] leave that house; (5) that house gone; (6) [family] arrived [at] motel; (7) they are so fed up! The actual scenes varied somewhat. The person who had not seen the movie, for example, signed that there might have been a funeral of dead people acting as pallbearers carrying a coffin and weeping and wailing. What is striking is that both the adults assumed that the words written represented a fuller sign narrative. While the Poltergeist text displays a chronological narrative as well as a visual focus, resembling the National Theater of the Deaf rescue story, the "V" text is not obviously chronological. Neither educator had seen "V", although one remembered something about it. The adults were equally comfortable with interpreting the "V" text as a written-down version of a signed narrative, even though they could not speculate about what some of it might mean. They signed sequences of the images they thought the English words represented, and agreed that they thought the story "behind" the text was surely an acceptable and even typical one for ASL if they could only see the child telling it. They were both sure the child was attempting to write what he had seen through a sequence of images like "Dreams" or "Twisted Joints," rather than a thematic narrative. For

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children such as the "V" writer, English primarily appears to be vocabulary which they use to represent the more complex signs they are using for communication. A notable reaction to this text is that both deaf educators interpreted the reference to plane in the text to be metaphorical, that something about bodies on fire looked like a plane. One developed his interpretation to suggest that maybe someone on fire was running with arms spread and then jumped off, looking like a plane. Both thought thatthe text referred to a dream sequence in which one boy was haunted by the image of someone on fire. Both interpreted that there was some conspiring of a group to fight off the threat. Neither knew what to make of the references to rocks. In contrast to the reactions of these deaf ASL signers, a group of hearing adults who were asked to read these texts as part of another study (Maxwell & Falick, 1989) interpreted them very differently. They found the first text easy to interpret as well, except there was much discussion about whether the mother meant to fool the boy all along or was just making an excuse at the end. They thought the Poltergeist text was an attempt to justify the designation of "favorite" by giving evidence and elaborating on scariness. They noted the weaknesses in English syntax, and they desired more details that would realize the corinectedness implied by the inclusion and placement of the sentences in English expository prose and thematic narrative. They commented on what they felt were vocabulary problems: funeral for graveyard, gone for disappeared or swallowed up, and so on. They found the "V" text incomprehensible. They thought it contained no direct statement about why "V" was the child's favorite, no real coritent about the movie, its characters or action, and they complained that they could not figure out the text. They saw no structure and were not willing to call the text a text at all. They-alternated between resorting to syntactically derived arguments attempting to force some basic English sentences out of the words and speculating about what, for example, "white rock" might mean or whether there was one explosion or a sequence of episodes. It was obvious to them that the text refers to what the writer had seen in the show, but the judges wondered how much he had understood. Even those who had seen "V" couldn't follow this text or others like it. The discussion of the hearing people reading the text did not center on what the movie looked like but on what the plot might have been. Whereas the deaf educators speculated about what the writers had seen that led them to write down certain images, the strategy of the hearing educators was to try to complete or organize the words given into sentences. Hearing teachers dealing with such texts often have similar reactions in the classroom. They tend to approach instruction as a matter of forming children's words into English sentences; in other words, they see the child's text as an incomplete attempt at English (perhaps influenced by ASL). One speech pathologist assessing one deaf child thought the child must be learning disabled in order to produce a "word salad" similar to the "V" text. In contrast, the deaf educators see the written-down words as keys to what the child has seen. One can

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only wonder how many children using English words to write down key words of what they see as such visual-centered narratives have been judged to have no organization to their thinking. VISUAL-CENTERED NARRATIVES, BIOLOGY, AND ASL The examples presented illustrate visual-centered narratives that are different from the thematic narrative expected by the hearing adults. Some of what the children write is related to ASL, and some is not. But there is another aspect to the issue. Some written texts of deaf children who have no exposure to ASL or to any conventional sign system, also look like examples of visual-centered narratives. When presented with texts written by deaf children who do not sign (but told simply that the texts are produced by deaf children), signers tend to interpret them as if they were the same sort of English vocabulary partial representations of sign discourse as the signers' texts. One hearing teacher, for example, shown text written by a deaf child who did not sign, said, "it makes sense if you sign it." To hearing readers, at least some texts written by nonsigners are taken to be the writing of signers, and the "poorer" the quality of the writing the more likely people are to attribute it to signers (Langston & Maxwell, 1988). The hearing people asked to respond to these examples of visual-centered discourse were often at a loss, because it never seemed to occur to them that the communication they were trying to understand had any discourse structure. As a hearing student taking one of my university courses said after a class spent going over the structure of the National Theater of the Deaf rescue story, "I never saw the signs till you showed us. I thought it was just acted out." The tendency of much simultaneous spoken translation is to reduce a complex sign phrase to a single referent. This practice is misleading, contributing to miscomprehension in the Star Wars discourse. The transfer of the structure to written language confuses hearing readers even more. The results of teachers' confusion when presented with such discourse and their unsupportive responses to it can be tragic in the classroom. The deaf bilinguals who looked at the texts of signing deaf children were also shown the writing of nonsigning children (but told simply that all the texts were from deaf children)~ They signed these texts are readily as the ones written by signers. Both hearing and deaf readers took these texts to be written by signers because of the way they were written. The deaf readers assumed visual-centered narrative structure and interpreted the texts according to that expectation, still thinking that if they could see the children signing they would understand what they wanted to say. The hearing readers also attributed the writing to ASL but had no expectation of a visual-centered discourse structure; thus, they could interpret the texts like Poltergeist but despaired of comprehending the texts like "V" at all. Is this a case of the committed finding evidence where there is none? I think

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instead that it is a case of a common origin for visual-centered narratives in spite. of children's different environments. Perhaps this is a case where the biological condition of deafness makes children visual-centered, whether or not they are exposed to sign language. Thus children would produce visual-centered text, because they are biologically visual-centered and have limited (if any) access to other discourse structures used in the surrounding culture. Children who are deaf would start with similar responses to visual stimuli and thus develop an organizational principle based on visual array. The children exposed to ASL and Deaf Culture would eventually develop a visual-centered organizational principle into a full-fledged imagic narrative structure with artistic refinements and options for elaboration and linguistic sophistication. Those children have sign language to incorporate into their expression, and, therefore, linguistic elements to modify, expand, and organize their discourse. What shows up in the written English of these children is often the bare bones of that structure transformed into their limited abilities in English. In their arguments that deaf individuals are fundamentally visual in their orientation and processing, such writers as Erting (1985) and Padden and Humphries (1988), are focusing on deaf persons who sign. It may well be that many deaf children who do not sign (even those whose communication is primarily in speech) also use the visual organizational principle. Goldin-Meadow and Feldman (1975) described how deaf children not exposed to sign language at all, and involved in auditory and speech training, still oriented to their environment visually to the extent that, ad hoe, they created and conventionalized gestural language in their homes. Children exposed to little or no fluent perceptual input from adults nevertheless concatenate communication units, whether gestures invented by themselves (GoldinMeadow & Mylander, 1984) or signs used without fluency by hearing parents (Livingston, 1985). Deaf Culture may have taken a biological propensity to relate to the world visually and developed it rhetorically. Padden and Humphries (1988) focus on the relation between biology and culture in discussing the deaf community in America: the biological characteristic of not hearing is intimately bound up with Deaf people's culture and language. Deafness is a given, a fundarfiental aspect of their world. This is what we mean when we say we want to look at their lives from "a different center." (p. 110) Visual-centered narratives may be a discourse structure that starts with a biological condition and is developed culturally into a complex linguistic discourse form. It is important to recognize that everything deaf children do in communication is not necessarily derived from ASL. Some of what they do, like the nonsigning children's written visual-centered discourse, may be because they are deaf. It would be worthwhile to observe how visual-centered narratives of both

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groups of deaf children change over time. Nor is there any indication at this time how widespread visual-centered narrative or visual-centered experiences are among deaf children. Perhaps cognitive style, visual or auditory, may play a role in how deaf children relate to and develop language. There is an assumption in much o f the current discussion of deaf experience that all deaf individuals are fundamentally visual because of the impairment of heating, but it is certainly possible that there is variation in the population. Furthermore, there may certainly be cultural peoples who are not deaf who have developed visual-centered narrative structures, as the Kaluli have developed elaborate discourse based on sounds (Feld, 1982). The exploratory nature of this article should be emphasized. By highlighting discourse from different sources in this exploratory study, it should be clear that the examples of discourse presented here are not lacking structure and that vision plays a strong role in their structure. This is just a beginning, though, awaiting detailed analysis of visual-centered narrative structure (including the possibility that there may be several different structures of visual-centered narrative), investigation of the extent to which deaf individuals exhibit visual-centered structure, consideration of cross-cultural comparisons, study of the development of such structures, comparisons of deaf children with different linguistic backgrounds, evaluation o f the relation between such structures and English structures taught in the schools, and more. End Notes

1. All caps denote signed language. Hyphens between capitalized words indicate a single sign that requires more than one English word to produce a gloss. 2. To get children to talk for a language sample, adults often provide toys. This session took place in the school playroom, where the child was asked what toys he wanted to play with. He picked up a set of wooden pieces from a construction set and started to put them together. The adults signed and spoke simultaneously. The child signed only. One of the adults asked him what he was making. At first he signed for her to wait, then signed they should guess what it was as he held it like a rifle. One guessed, "a gun" and asked if he liked war. He responded, "STARWARS" and signed that he had many Star Wars toys at home. REFERENCES

Bomstein, H., Saulnier, K., & Hamilton, L. (1976). A guide to the selection and use of the teaching aids in the Signed English System. Teaching English to the Deaf, 1, 15-20. Commission on Education of the Deaf (1988). Toward equality: Ed,wation of the deaf(Report to the President and the Congressof the United States). Washington,DC: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office. Ellenberger, R., & Steyaert, M. (1978). Child's representation of action in AmericanSign Language. In P. Siple (Ed.), Understanding language through sign language research. New York: Academic.

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Erting, C. (1985). Sociocultural dimensions of deaf education: Belief systems and communicative interaction. Sign Language Stttdies, 47, 111-126. Feld, S. (1982). Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kahdi expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fischer, S. (1975). Influences on word order change in American Sign Language. In C. Li (Ed.), Word order and word order change. Austin: University of Texas Press. Frishberg, N. (1975). Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in American Sign Language. Language, 51, 696-719. Goldin-Meadow, S., & Feldman, It. (1975). The creation of a communication system: A study of deaf children of hearing parents. Sign Language Studies, 8, 225-234. Goldin-Meadow, S., & Mylander, C. (1984). The effects and non-effects of parental input on early language development. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 49, 1121. Jordan, I., Gustason, G., & Rosen, R. (1979). An update on eonmlunication trends at programs for the deaf. American Annals of the Deaf, 124, 350-357. Klima, A., & Bellugi, U. (1979). The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lane, H. (1984). When the mind hears. New York: Random House. Langston, C., & Maxwell, M. (1988). Ilolistic judgments of texts by deaf and ESL students. Sign Language Studies, 57, 295-312. Livingston, S. (1985). The acquisition of sign meaning in deaf children of hearing parents. In W.S. Stokoe & V. Volterra (Eds.), SLR "83: Sign language research. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press. Maxwell, M., & Falick, T. (1989, November). Cohesion and q,lality in deaf and hearing children's texts. Paper presented to the Speech Communication Association, San Francisco. Michaels, S. (1981). "Sharing time": Children's narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society, 10, 423-443. Moulton, R., Roth, L., & Tao, Jiang. (1987). Barriers to the teaching profession for hearing.. impaired adults. American Annals of the Deaf, 132, 372-375. Newport, E. (1981). Constraints on structure: Evidence from American Sign Language and language learning. In A. Collins (Ed.), Aspects of the development of competence. The Minnesota Symposia on ChiM Psychology, 14, 93-124. Padden, C., & Humphries, T. (1988). Deaf in America: Voices from a culture. Cambridge, MA: tlarvard University Press. Quigley, S., & Kretschmer, R. (1982). The education of deaf children. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. Raimondo, D., & Maxwell, M. (! 987). The modes of communication used in junior and senior high school classrooms by hearing-impaired students and their teachers and peers. The Volta Review, 89, 277-286. Rutherford, S. (1985). The traditional group narrative of deaf children. Sign Language Studies, 47, 141-172. Stokoe, W. (1980). The study and use of sign language. In W. Stokoe (Ed.), Sign and culture. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press. Vernon, M. (1984). Deaf teachers. American Annals of the Deaf, 129, 303. Wilbur, R. (1987). American Sign Language: Linguistic and applied dimensions. San Diego, CA: College ttill Press.