The Case For Bilingual Deaf Children - UConn

Deaf News: UConn researchers want to understand the science behind how early access to language affects learning in Deaf and Hearing children.



MANSFIELD, CT -- UConn Today: Marie Coppola and a number of other researchers at UConn want to understand the science behind how early access to language affects learning in Deaf and Hearing children. Deaf children are just as intellectually capable as hearing children – but if they do not have early access to language and communication, that intellectual capacity can quickly erode.



Eight-year-old Marie Coppola could hear the dial tone on the other end of the phone. Second ring … third ring. She was a little clammy, but not as nervous as the first few times she’d picked up and dialed on this sunny Philadelphia afternoon.



A middle-aged woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”



“Hello,” Coppola said, affecting what she thought was a deep, confident tone. “I’m calling about your ad in the Inquirer for cleaning services.”



The woman was not fooled. “Excuse me?” she began testily.



“It’s for my mother,” Coppola rushed on. “She’s deaf, but she is highly qualified and can provide references. If you’d like to meet her, I can arrange it. She’s available any afternoon this week …”



Amy Coppola, standing with a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, looked on. Her daughter trailed off, eyebrows furrowed. She tried a few more cajoling words, but finally mumbled, “Okay, thank you,” and hung up.



Her mother didn’t need to ask. “Better luck next time?” she signed.



“Yes,” signed Marie. She trudged across the room, disgruntled.



“I’m going to my room. I’ll be back for dinner,” she signed – in the Deaf custom of telling people where you’re going when you leave, and when you’ll be back – before disappearing down the hall.



Forty years later, Marie Coppola, now assistant professor of psychological sciences and linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is still disgruntled. Even today, amid a surge of technology that promises to give Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people access to sound, Coppola says Deaf people, along with their language and their culture, are not being heard.



Coppola was recently awarded a $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, one of the largest in the program’s history, to study the impact of early language experiences – whether spoken or signed – on how children learn. She hopes her work will help people better understand that sign language is just as worthy as spoken language... Read Full Article.

The Deaf Body in Public Space - NY Times

Deaf News: The Deaf Body in Public Space from New York Times.



NEW YORK CITY -- “It’s rude to point,” my friend told me from across the elementary-school cafeteria table. I grasped her words as I read them off her lips. She stared at my index finger, which I held raised in midair, gesturing toward a mutual classmate. “My mom said so.”



I was 6 or 7 years old, but I remember stopping with a jolt. Something inside me froze, too, went suddenly cold.



“I’m signing,” I said out loud. “That’s not rude.”



As the only Deaf student in my elementary school, I had already stumbled across the challenges of straddling two languages and two modes of communication. My family was hearing, but they still empowered me by using both English and sign language at home.



A sign language interpreter accompanied me throughout the day at school, and my teachers created a welcoming environment for me to learn, but finding a place to belong with kids my own age often felt more difficult. I tried to speak to them, and occasionally they reciprocated the effort by learning some basic signs. But usually I felt separate.



I went home that day and asked my mother about what my friend had said. “Don’t worry,” my mother said, “she doesn’t know the social rules are different with signing. You aren’t being rude.” With that, matter-of-fact as always, she brought the conversation to an end. But I still felt a lingering self-consciousness, entirely novel and difficult to shake.



This was perhaps the first time I realized that other people could see me as obtrusive, as taking up too much space, when I was simply communicating just as I was.



When I reflect on this memory two decades later, I recognize how my childhood friend, whom at the time I had found to be so accusatory, had really gaped at me with a sort of wonder. My signing challenged the rules of social conduct she’d absorbed from adults, and to her I must have seemed ignorant or radically rebellious, or perhaps both. But pointing was a truly fundamental act for me; it was how I expressed what my grown-up scholarly self would call relationality - the idea of being in the world in relation to others. Through sign language, a properly poised finger allowed me to say you and me and he and she and they. If I did not point, how could I make a human connection? ... Read More at New York Times.