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Episode One: Language of the Eye

American Sign Language, or ASL, is a complicated, fascinating language that defies many neurological and linguistic "norms" associated with spoken communication. Sam, following Dr. Tabitha Payne, is swept up in organizing an ASL poetry slam, and explores grammatical, neurological, and historical facets of ASL on the way.

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Introduction: More and Train

"More" in ASL (lifeprint).

"Train" in ASL (lifeprint).

(introductory music)

Before I was able to speak, I could sign. My parents, who were maybe a bit too eager to start conversing with their new child, began teaching me American Sign Language, or ASL, when I was barely able to sit up. This practice actually isn’t all that uncommon in my community – teaching hearing infants to sign was a popular trend in parenting when I was growing up – and, like most other children taught ASL, I picked up a few common phrases pretty quickly. I forget most of them now – this was long ago, after all – and the only two I remember are the most circumstantial possible: tapping the tips of my fingers together meant more, which I deployed frequently whenever there wasn’t enough food in my highchair. If I pointed outwards with my index and middle fingers of my right hand, then with the same fingers of my left moved crosswise against them like I was brushing off dust, I was making the sign for train. My house was just a block from a set of tracks, and several times a day a train would come by and make the walls and floors vibrate. I was very keen to alert my family whenever this was happening.

As an infant, I had the neurological capacity for language, but not for movement complex enough to produce it. Language is, subtly, a very physically-challenging act: think about all the ways in which our tongues and cheeks and lips need to move just to produce a sentence. When I was six months old, it was easier to wiggle my fingers than to control my speech organs. For my parents, this was mindblowing – an opportunity to communicate with their child months before I developed the physical capacity for spoken language, or the mental capacity to understand the complexities of grammar and syntax.

The thing was, I didn’t understand those complicated linguistic features back then, either. I simply knew how to indicate certain objects or make simple requests; I couldn’t form a sentence, or a question, but I could ask for more food.

As a result, I think, my understanding of sign language was built on the foundation of an infant’s capacity for it. I grew up believing that ASL was no more complicated than what I had been taught before I could walk: just signs for objects or concepts, unconnected to signifiers of more complicated language like grammar, morphology, and so on. My parents, too, never viewed my babyish ASL as “real” language – for them, signing was just a steppingstone on the path to true, nuanced oral communication.

Then, I was given the chance to do research over the summer with my college as part of a writing project: you’re currently listening to its final product. My cohort and I were each tasked with working with a different professor’s lab. We would shadow these professors and their students, read their papers, understand their disciplines thoroughly, and by the end, have something to show for it: a journalistic expose, or a cycle of poems, or some other piece of writing that, in some way, reflects science.

Our options were myriad. For a small liberal arts college, there’s an impressive amount of research going on here: one of our possible mentors uses advanced computational algorithms to analyze the origins of our universe; another excavates the mysteries behind early humans and their surprising neurological capacities.

I must’ve been thinking about my parents teaching me to sign when I made the decision, though, to follow a psychology lab focusing on ASL. At this point, my own understanding of American Sign Language was that of the layman or the eager parent: it was, to me, a corollary for English, a simple form of communication that never came close to language we speak aloud.

I think my own perspective is similar to that of many hearing people, who grow up without any real exposure to Deaf individuals or the community and culture they have created. To many parents who teach their children to sign, ASL is something that babies grow out of – a stepping-stone towards a “real” language like English, not a language on its own, one fully-equipped with enough complexity for poetry and literature. Even for those of us who believe already that ASL is a real language, this connotation with teaching very young people can pollute our perspective – after all, if ASL is something children learn before English, then we’re inherently assuming that ASL is less of a language than English. That it’s easier than English, or doesn’t require as much of a grasp of grammar to understand. Often, if we’re never presented with an alternative to this perspective, this simplified understanding of ASL can bleed into our perception of Deaf people, and of their mental and communicative abilities. If ASL is something a six-month old can learn, this perspective suggests, then Deaf people who use exclusively it to communicate can’t be doing so with all that much nuance or intelligence. I hope you can already see how wrong – and how dangerous – such a perspective can be.

I hope, then, that this episode can be that alternative viewpoint for hearing people who might not otherwise know or interact personally with Deaf people or ASL users – the term for which, by the way, is “signer”, and this will be used throughout the rest of the episode. There is, of course, an irony in producing audio content about a soundless language – but my goal is to make this information as easily-accessible as possible for hearing people: to create something that you can put on in the background while you go for a run or drive to work or prepare dinner. Educating oneself can be hard to come by if that mode of self-education is intimidating: sitting down and reading a thick book, or struggling to stay awake through a documentary. This is meant to be a first step for anybody interested in ASL or Deaf culture as a whole: not intimidating, easy to access, frank and unassuming. If I’ve successfully taught you something, or piqued your interest to pursue this material further, then I’ve done my job.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When this whole undertaking began, I was still unsure what I was even going to talk about, much less how to produce it all into a cogent podcast.

(bright, jazzy music)

Dr. Tabitha Payne studies experimental cognitive psychology, but the day I first met her she preferred to talk about her 2022 Dodge Challenger SXT Plus. The daughter of several generations of engineers, she had just returned from the Detroit Women’s Motor Fest, where she and her eleven-year-old daughter had shown off this insane muscle car. It comes in many colors; hers has orange mango stripes, which she is keen to point out is the rarest pattern. To her, the car is a way of staying in touch with her family – like collecting baseball cards because your late grandpa loved to.

The car smelled as if it had been bought yesterday. I felt the engine in my neck as Dr. Payne insisted on driving me a few hundred feet from the coffee shop to her office. A self-described permanent seventies’ kid, she played Aerosmith during the ride. She’s also shorter than me, and I was nicknamed “Bite Sized” in fourth grade. Over the course of the next few weeks, she would buy me at least fifty dollars worth of food – as a college student, I cannot complain here -- and teach me how to use a bow and arrow without speaking, to demonstrate how easily we can learn just by watching a teacher’s hands.

I might be making Dr. Payne out to sound like something of an eccentric, but she’s a serious scientist, just one who happens to drive a cooler car than you. Her PhD research from Georgia Tech has been used by the U.S. Air Force to select candidates fit for flying fighter jets. She has published work on individual differences in working memory capacity and controlled attention, including an analysis of eye movement as we read in our native language versus a language we’ve been learning for a few years. She was also mentored by Lyn Miles, a primate linguistic researcher who taught an orangutan, Chantek, an impressive number of signs in ASL in the 90s. Dr. Payne explored how Chantek could describe tastes and odors with ASL. As we walked into her lab that first day, our discussion bounced from topic to topic – Persian cuneiform; musical synesthesia; sculpture and art and their connection to language; her new dog, a nine-month-old dachshund named Scarlet.

Recently, though, her research has tended towards ASL. Outside of academia, Dr. Payne has already done plenty with the Deaf community – that’s with a capital “D.” She explains this distinction to me as we sit near a large art installation by Jo Westfall, a local artist with whom Dr. Payne has worked many times before. There’s deafness, lowercase “d”, which refers to the condition of being unable to hear in some or total capacity. A lowercase-d deaf person has this condition. Meanwhile, uppercase-D Deaf is a bit more abstract: something which refers to the culture which many people with the condition of deafness have made together. Deaf poetry, for example, is not lowercase-d deaf but uppercase-D, a piece of art which the Deaf community creates.

Dr. Payne’s brother-in-law was born deaf – the term for this in academic and medical circles is congenitally deaf – and her husband had been signing with him for his entire life. When Dr. Payne married into that family, she married into Deaf culture as well. She’s embraced it fully as an organizer. For three years, she’s run a weekly Signing Yoga program as a teaching exercise while explaining ASL and its role in Deaf culture; this work was inspired by films focusing on language disability issues. she’s created with the Story Center at the University of California at Berkeley. She’s keen to express that ASL isn’t just for Deaf people – that it can be an effective form of communication for hearing people with speech disabilities as well.

I didn’t realize when I first met her, but we would spend most of the summer organizing an ASL slam poetry show with her and several local artists. Through this poetry show, and other events she’s already carried out, Dr. Payne is working towards her larger mission outside of academia: spreading Deaf culture, and educating a hearing audience about this significant part of the population. As you can imagine from the medium I’ve chosen to deliver this to you in, I’ve decided to come along for the ride.

According to a 2011 American Community Survey, almost 11 million people consider themselves deaf. That’s about a quarter of the population that speaks Spanish, and over three times as much as the population that speaks a variety of Chinese – the second most-commonly spoken foreign language in the country.

Forty percent of our generation is going to lose some or all of our hearing, Dr. Payne says. She makes this point several times in the first two weeks of my time with her. Gen-Z’s excessive headphone usage is going to go on to create a huge swell in the deaf population. She talks about her job as an educator like she’s preparing us for the inevitable – and, well, the data agrees with her. The World Health Organization estimates that over a billion people of my generation might be at serious risk for hearing loss. Dr. Payne’s philosophy is a bit like this: teach hearing people about ASL and Deaf culture now, and we won’t be thrust into a world of silence with no tools to help us navigate it in our sixties and seventies. In a way, Dr. Payne says, this will be a good thing – it might help to break down some of the stigmas which have inevitably risen around the Deaf community: that all deaf people are in some way mentally disabled, that ASL is a babyish, illegitimate language.

I suppose I had better listen, then. While I still can.

ASL: Grammar and Fluency

Handshape is perhaps the most intuitive parameter of meaning for hearing people with limited experience of ASL (Adamo-Villani 2007).

Several more examples demonstrating possible places of articulation for a sign (Rice University).

Palm orientation has a wide variety of possible options, each with a different implication for a sign's meaning (github.io).

The way a sign moves in ASL contributes to its meaning (Wiley Online Library).

In ASL, nonmanual markers like facial expression are vital for conveying a sign's tone (Rutgers University).

(slow, curious music)

One of the things I want to do in this episode is not just explain ASL’s importance to Deaf culture, or the huge breadth of art one can create with it, but also walk you through some of the linguistics behind this language, which is unique like no other spoken one. In fact, serious study of ASL can break down all of our preconceptions about what language is and has to be to begin with.

There are, honestly, so many places to start here. But let’s try to break down some of the most basic grammar of ASL, so you know why, exactly, it’s as complex as any other language.

The main unit of communication in ASL is the sign. We can think of signs as words, but it’s slightly more than that: some signs just represent individual letters for a process called fingerspelling, where ASL signers quickly spell something out in English in the air for which there’s no preestablished sign.

But fingerspelling isn’t all that common. So we’ll focus on non-fingerspelled signs for now. Every sign differentiates itself from others with a wide variety of parameters.

Linguistics has debated on the number of parameters, but I’m using the five outlined by Dr. Ben Bahan in his 1996 dissertation from Boston University. If you’re interested in reading more about the grammar of American Sign Language, resources will be available on this podcast’s website, along with a free transcript of this episode with visual aids.

Hand configuration refers to the shape your hand takes when making a particular sign. This parameter is probably the most intuitive for non-signers, and perhaps the thing you notice first when watching someone signing: splaying out our fingers versus curling them into a fist, or otherwise creating any number of possible handshapes.

Place of articulation, the second component, is a scientific way of saying “location of a sign in space.” After making a certain shape with your hand, you’ve got to figure out where your hand is going to go. If I hold my fist directly parallel to my chest, versus pressing it into my forehead, that sign’s place of articulation is different.

The third component is palm orientation. This one is fairly simple, and related to handshape, but it’s different enough to warrant its own classification. If your sign is made with your palm facing your body, versus facing away from you, versus, say, being open and pointed upwards, then its palm orientation is different each of those times. You can almost think about it as the way your wrist is positioned as you’re signing – pointing your palm inwards, or outwards, or upwards, and so on.

Movement of a sign is also important. The fourth component can vary in a wide number of ways, but let’s focus on the simple ones for now, again using my curled-up fist as an example: if i move my fist from my forehead to my sternum in one simple motion, that action represents one possible movement of this sign. Meanwhile, if I move my fist from my forehead to the open air on the right side of my head, that sign will have a different meaning – however subtle – from my previous sign.

One more, and then we can move onto something else. Dr. Bahan calls this last parameter “nonmanual markers” – basically, things which create meaning without using the hands. In ASL, this is most often seen in facial expression, or slight movements of the head. For example, if I wanted to signal that an event happened in the past in one dialect of ASL, I would turn my head to the left, signifying that it had happened at some point before this. As you can imagine, this is one of the most important aspects of ASL.

Taken together, these five parameters allow for the creation of thousands of unique signs, all expressing different words and concepts – hardly something simplistic.

(quick, slightly mischievous music)

Like any language, ASL has varying degrees of fluency – one can sign simply, in a way that is perfectly grammatically correct yet lacking the smoothness of a fluent signer’s rendering of that same sign. Discovering these nuances is often very difficult for adult learners – a 1996 analysis by Rhonda Jacobs revealed that ASL is a Category 4 language for native English speakers. This makes it as difficult for us English speakers to learn as Mandarin or Arabic. The assumption that ASL is “easier” than other languages to learn because it’s not spoken is anything but accurate – in fact, this is one of the things that can make it so tough. All of the other Category 4 languages recognized by the U.S. Department of State – which ranks languages by their ease for government workers or military personnel to learn – depart significantly from our normal understandings of English, using different writing systems or sounds than we’re used to: Korean, Japanese, Cantonese and, as I already mentioned, Mandarin and Arabic. ASL doesn’t just have a different writing system, though: it literally doesn’t have one at all. Personally, I’d rather try to learn a new alphabet or thousands of characters than learn a language that doesn’t have one at all.

Dr. Payne gives me an example of one of the many nuances of ASL: if you want to sign “I don’t want” in ASL, the way we go about it might not be so intuitive for English speakers.

A beginning signer might think it works like this, because this is how English and many other languages do it: First, point at yourself with your dominant, signing I. Then place your thumb on the bottom of your chin, and flick it up slightly so that it comes away from your face. That means don’t. Now hold out both hands in front of your chest, with your palms open, like you’re checking to see if it’s raining out or not. Pull your hands slightly into your chest while closing your fingers, scooping up the air. This means want.

That’ll definitely get across whatever you’re trying to say. Maybe a Deaf friend is offering you more snacks and you’ve had plenty already. But it’s overly simplistic, and almost unnatural-looking to a Deaf person, almost as if you said “I do not want” in English rather than “I don’t.”

That Deaf, ASL-fluent friend of yours, when you flip the tables and offer her some of your own snacks the next day, would put it like this: the same sign for I as before, but skip the chin-flick for don’t. Make the grabbing sign for want and then, once your fingers are tightened, release them, twist your wrists a hundred eighty degrees, and throw whatever invisible thing you’ve taken to the floor. Instead of “I don’t want”, you’re signing something more like “want not.” Not exactly a one-to-one corollary with English.

ASL is full of these tiny linguistic features: the way a person signs can tell you so much about that person’s experience with ASL and even their general place of origin. The sign for pizza, for example, varies depending on what city a signer is coming from. This means that, yes, ASL has accents, as variable and geographically-inflected as American English. Dr. Payne herself admits that her Deaf brother-in-law tells her that she signs with a Southern dialect – almost as if she spoke with a Georgia twang.

ASL: Consider the Brain

Broca's area is responsible for language production, Wernicke's area for language comprehension (National Institute of Health).

(jangly, strummed music)

Before we get back to Dr. Payne’s work and my time with her, I’d like to discuss some of the neuroscience behind ASL as well.

ASL is also a language on the neurological level. This means that, effectively, the same regions of the brain which light up when we speak a verbal language are also stimulated when someone is signing.

Most language processing is handled in the left hemisphere of your brain, which has tended to be associated with complicated, logical problem-solving. Within this hemisphere, different sections handle different linguistic processes.

If you were to touch the left side of your forehead, your hand would be hovering over Broca’s area. A dense patch of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, Broca’s area is thought to be responsible for production of language – responding to a question, or starting a conversation with someone. People with damage to this part of their brains can understand language perfectly, but are unable to generate language of their own.

Meanwhile, if you moved your hand back – until it feels like you’re cupping the area above your left ear – you would be as close as you can get to Wernicke’s area. This is pretty much the inverse of Broca’s area: language comprehension is processed here. If Broca’s area lets you respond to a question, Wernicke’s area lets you understand what the other person is even saying to you in the first place. If this part of your brain is damaged, you can speak perfectly well, but as soon as you hear language from someone else, you can’t make sense of it.

Well. Maybe I shouldn’t say hear. A case study from 1987 analyzed the linguistic processing ability of six deaf people, all of which communicated fluently in ASL, who had suffered unilateral strokes. These strokes permanently damaged certain areas of their brains. Awful as it is, studying stroke victims or other people with severe damage to their brains can allow us to see what parts of the brain do what – if we know someone’s prefrontal cortex has been damaged, and that they struggle with decision-making, then it’s possible to assume that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision-making.

The stroke victims who had suffered damage to their left hemispheres – remember, the home of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas – experienced language problems. Those who had frontal regions of their left hemisphere damaged struggled to sign coherently, and those who suffered a stroke further back in their brains were unable to comprehend the signing of others. In other words: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas don’t just function in spoken language, but in ASL as well.

But this gets a bit more complicated when considering what makes ASL so profoundly unique as a language. Neuroscientists have been debating the role of the right hemisphere – you know, the creative, visual “right brain” – in ASL processing. The right hemisphere comes in handy for visuospatial processing – think depth perception, or catching a ball. It’s also critical for decoding the emotion behind facial expressions. Unlike other languages, ASL relies on these things to a significant degree. Remember how I talked about a sign’s place of articulation and movement as being parameters indicative of meaning, and the importance of nonmanual markers in ASL? These are aspects of ASL which necessarily engage our visually-, spatially-oriented right hemispheres. So in some ways, ASL is a language that incorporates more of our brains than spoken language -- a language which requires use of both hemispheres, rather than, as we’ve been led to expect, just our left one.

Sign Why: The Complexities of ASL Translation

Dr. Payne's students sign "I Want It That Way" for a final in her course on the psychology of language

Translation is much harder than one might expect; a 1996 study evaluated ASL as a category IV language, as difficult as Mandarin or Arabic (U.S. Dept. of State).

(slow, curious music)

I’m spending more and more time in Dr. Payne’s lab. She’s eager to hear my questions. I ask her about the sorts of things she’s done in her classes with ASL, and she lights up.

It’s about, for Dr. Payne, making students engage with the language – actually creating ASL content of their own. Coincidentally, her methods wind up teaching me a lot about the artistry of knowing ASL.

Translation into ASL isn’t as easy as you might first assume. Intuition again betrays us, suggesting that ASL is simply an exact corollary to English – that when I sign out “the sky is blue”, my hands form shapes meaning the, sky, is, and blue.

But this is a reductive view not just of ASL, but of languages in general. The process of carrying over an idea from English into ASL is significantly more complicated than simply putting every word you hear into signing.

Dr. Payne had her students create ASL translations of popular songs for her course on psycholinguistics. These songs feature certain lyrical elements Dr. Payne’s students carefully worked around in the process of translation.

For instance: one of Dr. Payne’s favorite examples is an ASL translation of the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit “I Want It That Way." Yes, really. Right off the bat, we run into the issue of two linguistic systems colliding rather than interlocking perfectly: the song’s title. “That way” isn’t really something that would make sense in ASL, because its syntax – or bank of possible words – differs from that of English. So Dr. Payne’s students, at the chorus of the song, had to passionately sign out something that might literally be translated back into English as “I want it the same as that direction I’ve previously signed in.” Not super poetic to us. But perfectly fine in ASL.

There’s also something to be said about translation for the sake of the audience. The phrase “tell me why” is confusing to translate into ASL, but in a different way. This is a language that is intimately tied to the Deaf community and its culture – so literally translating terms from English which reference speech and language in a traditional sense would feel out of place, a little ridiculous, akin to directly translating the affectionate French phrase mon chou (mą shoe) as my cabbage. So Dr. Payne’s students were not merely translating across linguistic boundaries but cultural ones. “Tell me why” became “sign why”; after all, “tell” implies speech, which ASL doesn’t use. “I never wanna hear you say” became “I never wanna see you sign.” They eliminated language which references hearing or speaking, and altered it to suit the particularities of ASL. When a phrase in English just didn’t make sense in ASL, they had to make more alterations: the lyric “deep down inside of me” is perfectly fine for us, but it’s, umm, a bit explicit in ASL, and hardly carries the meaning of the original English. So her students found a workaround, signing something that might read to us as “in my heart.”

This is one of the fascinating, and beautiful, and quite challenging, things about translation – and when that translation is occurring into a language which operates in a completely different way than we’re used to, the degree of cultural translation becomes even more pronounced.

It’s this sort of education that Dr. Payne wants to spread for hearing people. Since 1987, she tells me, university ASL courses have seen a four-thousand percent increase in enrollment. Now, there are more signers who can hear than there are Deaf signers. Now more than ever, Dr. Payne believes, hearing audiences need to make themselves more aware of ASL.

Part of her teaching practice, of course, is education about Deaf culture and deafness as a whole. When I begin observing her lab she’s working on creating a Deaf Awareness Spectrum. This is, more or less, supposed to function as a litmus test for how each person in a community feels or is aware of Deaf culture and the hundreds of thousands of people who make it up. At first, it begins as just a survey. Dr. Payne and her research student this summer, Bella Strickland, are determining what kinds of questions they can ask of participants to extract their likelihood to understand Deafness and, therefore, be better equipped to learn ASL. They’re relatively basic now – asking people if they believe that there’s a “cure” for Deafness, or if deafness often cooccurs with other mental disabilities – but grow more nuanced in the coming weeks. In reality, many congenitally deaf people don’t consider themselves disabled at all – and don’t particularly wish that they could hear like how we might think they do.

Learning any language, Dr. Payne tells me, is really just learning the primary facets of a culture: after all, with language comes a culture’s stories, poetry, and theater – and each language’s metaphors or phrases can be traced back to its history, or cultural climate. Teaching students ASL, she believes, should be as much about educating them in Deaf culture as it is about explaining handshape and nonmanual markers.

From Plato to Paris: The History of Sign

Ginouvier's "A Lesson with Abbe Charles Michel de l'Epee after a Painting by F. Peyson", captures daily life at one of the earliest schools for deaf individuals in Europe (National Geographic).

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a close associate of Cogswell's, traveled to Paris to study the methods of the city's thriving school for the Deaf (Gallaudet University).

In 1817, Cogswell's dream for his daughter Alice was realized when the American School for the Deaf was opened. The School still functions today (Wikipedia).

Thomas Edison's recording, made at the turn of the 20th century, portrays a Deaf woman reciting the U.S. national anthem. View the whole video here.

Deaf clubs were instrumental for creating a stronger Deaf community - and Deaf members went on to become pioneers in ASL poetry and theater (Gallaudet University).

Dr. William Stokoe, a literature professor by training, coined the term "American Sign Language" in 1965, thereby defining it as a legitimate language (deafhistory.eu).

(ghostly, airy music)

Let’s talk about some of that, then, and explore the history of Deaf culture – and the way it’s deeply intwined with ASL. The origins of sign language are difficult to parse out. When we think of historical records, we inevitably think about things which were written down – old archives stuffed with shelves and shelves of yellowing documents. But sign language, for centuries, had no way to express itself on the page, lacking a writing system. Sadly, all we can hope for in studying this very early history of signing is that some literate, hearing writer had a chance encounter with a Deaf person or their community, and wrote some of their thoughts down in text which has been preserved to this day.

The earliest recorded example we have of sign language takes us to Ancient Greece: Plato, in his Socratic dialogue Cratylus, which is dated around 360 BCE, wrote about people who, quote, “make signs with the hand and head and the rest of the body”. St. Augustine and Leonardo da Vinci are among other historical figures who devoted some of their writings to musings on signing and the Deaf.

Many centuries after Plato, human populations were exploding. Urbanization became the norm, and hundreds of thousands of people moved into rapidly-expanding cities. Cramming all sorts of people together inevitably resulted in more encounters with the Deaf: Londoners John Bulwer and Samuel Pepys, writing in the middle of the 17th century, both described men and boys who, and I quote Bulwer’s journal here, “can argue and dispute rhetorically by signs”.

But the story of modern American Sign Language begins, perhaps unexpectedly, in Paris. In 1779, Pierre Desloges a Deaf Parisian printer – began writing about himself and his Deaf community. This was an enormous step forward for awareness of Deaf culture, and one inexorably tied to the history of signing.

Sign language cannot truly exist in a vacuum. Like any language, its complexities grow when it is spoken by a wider number of people, each needing to express their own ideas. Urbanization allowed Deaf individuals to form larger communities, thereby increasing the circulation of sign language – and its role in Deaf culture, as something which tied these people together. Desloges pointed out that the communicative ability of Deaf individuals in rural provinces was, quote, “limited to physical things and bodily needs.” In sprawling Paris, though, with so many fellow Deaf signers to communicate with, they could sign freely, quote “on all subjects with as much order, precision, and rapidity as if [they] enjoyed the faculty of speech and hearing.”

Desloges’s writings attracted the attention of the abbot Charles-Michel de l'Épée, who would go on to study Parisian sign language and found the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. This institution, the very of its kind that we have knowledge of, gathered young Deaf people across the country and brought them to live, sign, and study together. It garnered global attention, particularly for its sign language pedagogy adapted from Desloges’s community’s signing system.

We jump across the Atlantic now, to the turn of the 19th century. In Hartwell, Connecticut, a wealthy philanthropist, Mason Cogswell, was seeking a proper education for his deaf daughter Alice. The tutors he was hiring for her were disappointing – they seemed to have no idea how to address his daughter’s deafness – and so he turned to Europe, where rumors of wildly successful schools for the deaf were spreading.

Cogswell sent Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a close friend and colleague, to Europe to study these schools and their methods of education, hoping to create one of his own for his daughter and other American children like her. Gallaudet traveled to Paris, where he spent time at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes Pierre Desloges had helped to create a generation before. He formed an especially close friendship with Laurent Clerc, a signing teacher at the Institution who had once been a student himself. Gallaudet convinced Clerc to leave Paris and come with him to New England, to help guide the creation of Cogswell’s new school.

Clerc agreed, and played an instrumental role in the creation of the earliest institutions for the deaf in the country. In 1817, Mason Cogswell opened the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which attracted deaf children from all over New England and is still open today. At this point in history, there had already been several enclaves of Deaf communities using their own, completely distinct variants of sign language in New England. The most famous of these communities was located on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where in some towns as many as a quarter of the population was unable to hear. The sign language they used here was thought to have developed from a rural dialect of British Sign Language, from where most of the island’s inhabitants had moved generations before.

At the American School for the Deaf, children from Martha’s Vineyard and other signing communities – each with their own version of sign language distinct from Parisian sign language – were brought together to be educated. They were taught, formally, Desloges’s Parisian sign language. But over time, the unique elements of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, and others like it, fused with the version of sign language they were taught in schools, creating a new signing system with elements from many different dialects. This became American Sign Language.

Clerc and Gallaudet continued to travel around New England, setting up new schools for the deaf and spreading their pedagogy. ASL, for a time, flourished.

Sign language went under for a brief time, as deaf pedagogy pointed more towards a signless, “purely oral” approach, where Deaf students were taught to read lips. But the advent of film technology changed this.

One of the first films ever made in America, made by Thomas Edison in 1902, features a Deaf woman reciting “The Star-Spangled Banner” in ASL. Edison was creating a demo test for the film camera – trying to prove that film could effectively showcase the body and hands in movement. There was, in his eyes, no better way to do this than through ASL. By 1913, the National Association of the Deaf – NAD – had created eighteen films with signers. Videotaping of sign language presentations proliferated. Deaf preachers had their sermons recorded. Lectures by Deaf scholars and linguists were captured on film. If you’re interested in seeing some of these films, I welcome you to check out the transcript of this episode on our website, which features Edison’s video and more.

By the Second World War, Deaf culture was spreading steadily through institutions for deaf children and sign language films. During the 1940s, the country’s first Deaf clubs were formed. These were large halls with stages where hundreds of Deaf people could gather. They exploded in popularity during the war. Here, members of the Deaf community performed skits, beauty pageants, songs in sign, and screened films. Most importantly, full-length theater productions – popular plays translated into ASL – were huge, attracting two or three hundred people per showing.

These plays were the first serious act of considering sign as a form of performance, a precursor to the poetry Dr. Payne and I now work with. Actors would translate their lines into signing, and perform them in front of an audience. A touring National Theatre of the Deaf opened in the 1960s; among their understudies, one young woman, Dorothy Miles, would go on to become one of the first and most popular poets of ASL.

But up until relatively recently, ASL hasn’t been recognized as a formal language. In fact, throughout these hundred-fifty-plus years of history, ASL just sort of existed. Signers, hearing people, and everyone interested in Deaf culture simply referred to it as “the sign language.”

The modern era of ASL – where we actually think of it as a real, distinct language – begins with Dr. William Stokoe, who was a professor of literature at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Yes, that’s the same Gallaudet who journeyed to France and discovered Parisian Sign Language. Stokoe ventured outside of his regular discipline to create a detailed linguistic explanation of ASL – loads more complicated than what I’ve taken you through today – which defined it as a real, complex language completely distinct from English. In 1965, he published his second work on sign language: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. This was the first time the term “American Sign Language” was used to refer to the sign language the Deaf community had been using for so long. Much of the linguistic detail I’ve explained above wouldn’t have been discovered if it weren’t for Stokoe and his efforts.

This isn’t the end of the story of ASL. And I don’t mean to make it seem as if every hurdle the Deaf community has had to get over to reach this point no longer exists – as if Dr. Stokoe’s work singlehandedly ended discrimination against Deaf people and misunderstanding of their culture. If there was nothing to prove, and we all understood that ASL is just as well as English or French, I wouldn’t have to be speaking to you right now, and Dr. Payne’s work in the Deaf community wouldn’t be necessary. But it is a good place to end this story, because it shows how slow the hearing world has been to pick up on the complexities of the world of Deaf culture. Sign language had existed since the days of the Ancient Greeks, yet it took American academia until the 1960s to pay it the attention it deserves. Think about all of the records of Deaf history that have been lost because no one bothered writing them down. All of these pieces of a culture that no longer exist, because we haven’t acknowledged them as worth preserving. The hearing world has been painfully, regretfully slow in coming to understand Deaf culture, and as such has come to ignore and falsely demean Deafness for years.

Why Language Matters

(slow, curious music)

Dr. Payne is a storyteller. Maybe you’ve already picked up on that from the amount of times I’ve talked about her in this episode – before almost everything else, she’s here to talk to you, to always position her work within a personal context. In the months I spend around her and Bella, I hear about so much from her – from the way she’s teaching her dachshund puppy to ride a paddleboard to her time learning Korean (which, for the record, she claims is easier than ASL) to her impulse decision to buy a gaudily-painted old car at an outdoor Halloween festival for her eleven-year-old daughter – that it’s hard to not feel like she’s becoming a friend. The continuous stream of free coffee and lunch doesn’t hurt, either.

When I ask her, then, to tell me what motivates her most – why she finds education about Deaf culture so important – she lays it out like this:

Dr. Payne grew up with her aunt, who, after many years with a severe reading disability was diagnosed with severe autism late in life. This experience, she says, made it that much easier to connect with the man who would become her husband when they first met: her husband grew up with his congenitally deaf younger brother, and had been signing sign age two. In each other, they found someone who understood life with someone the rest of the world was quick to dismiss. Her aunt passed away several years after they met, but Dr. Payne remained involved with her husband’s family.

Dr. Payne explains that language is the most important thing we can give young deaf people – that it’s absolutely essential for their wellbeing. Even with a college education, congenitally deaf people – who have never heard a word of English in their life – rarely rise above a third-grade reading level. Even Dr. Payne’s brother-in-law – who is lucky enough to have people to sign with – struggles with reading. He describes written English as his second language – so different from ASL, and even more difficult without knowledge of sounds to match letters to. What would it be like to read without a monologue in your head, repeating the words on the page back to you?

Imagine if I was born speaking fluent German. Maybe it’s a little silly. But hear me out. No matter how hard my parents try, I am completely unable to learn English or understand it. This is somewhat what it’s like to be born deaf – thrown into a world where you are permanently unable to communicate with almost everyone around you. In this scenario, my parents struggle to get me to understand English-language culture: after all, I can’t read newspapers or understand what’s happening on the TV. In order to make sure I can find a community – to make sure I have a place where I can express myself, and receive stimulation that my brain literally needs to function properly – my parents have two choices: either find a German-language school to send me, where I can learn surrounded by other people who communicate in the same way I do, or they can try to learn German themselves.

This is the reality for the parents of deaf children. Either they find other people in the Deaf community to sign with their child, or they learn ASL for themselves to communicate with their child.

Dr. Payne, who up until this point has been relentlessly sunny, saddens here. So few parents of deaf children actually do this, accommodating their child’s needs. Only one of out of every four congenitally deaf children is educated in sign language – either at home or through Deaf schools.

Oftentimes, their parents simply expect them to learn to read lips, or don’t even realize that their child is deaf until many years after they’re born. Some families don’t bother learning ASL at all. Their deaf children grow up sitting quietly in the corner, ignored.

The results can be neurologically catastrophic. Dr. Payne, a neuroscientist, knows this all too well. When we’re born, our brains are exceptionally malleable. This is how toddlers in bilingual households can learn multiple languages at such a shockingly fast rate. But around age five, that window of opportunity begins to shrink. Learning a language becomes much, much more difficult later in life. Anyone who has tried to learn a second language in college or high school can speak to this – struggling through vocab lists and conjugation charts is so much slower and more painstaking than the ease with which our younger brains molded themselves around English. Without linguistic stimulation for even longer – years and years – we suffer serious neurological damage. Our brains automatically cut out and shut down sections which aren’t being used, a process called synaptic pruning, as the unused branches of neurons in our central nervous systems are trimmed away. Pruned synapses never come back. When you’re never exposed to language for the first decade or more of your life, synaptic pruning will take away your capacity to learn it at any future point. Your Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas will be dissolved on a microscopic level. Forget stroke-induced damage: those parts of your brain will literally cease to exist and won’t show up on MRI scans. “Like Swiss cheese,” Dr. Payne puts it. “Your brain scans will look like Swiss cheese.”

Congenitally deaf children, whose parents never learn to sign with them, or never seek out Deaf schools and communities for them, experience this at alarming rates. Remember Desloges’s writings about Parisian signers compared to rural signers with fewer people in their community to sign with – how much more nuanced and capable they were with sign language. But at least those rural signers had somebody. Many children have no one at all.

Often, the disabilities hearing people believe deaf people have – dyslexia, or aphasia, or being unable to communicate sophisticatedly – are not intrinsic or naturally-occurring, but created through the ways hearing people have reacted to and ignored Deaf people throughout history. Children born to hearing parents, never given language, thrust into the hearing world and expected to simply deal with it, will of course grow up stunted.

Dr. Payne knows all of this, and wants to push – hard – against stereotypes about the Deaf community, about deafness, about ASL and its perceived simplicity. By creating a broader, more inclusive Deaf community, one which is ready to welcome hearing learners easily and comfortably, one where an understanding of ASL as a fully nuanced, complicated language all unto itself is the norm, she hopes that society can cast an even wider net – to catch deaf individuals who might otherwise never receive the language and communication their brains literally need.

Outro: More Still

(bright, jazzy music)

Which brings us to the climax of my time with Dr. Payne. Her goal, at the start of the summer, was to organize an ASL poetry show in our small college town, and as things start to wind down, the show starts to take shape.

We spend most of the summer gathering artists, poets, and signers – driving through rural backroads in her car, which roars when it accelerates and makes the cows look up confusedly at us, on our way to a different contact in the community. It feels something like a scene in a movie: the lead character assembling her team of heroes, or something. We visit Jo Westfall – the artist whose language-focused pieces hang now in Dr. Payne’s office – and drive out to meet Aurelio Diaz, a local politician, dancer, musician, and ASL teacher who learned to sign to communicate with nonverbal members of a dance troupe he coaches. We spend time scouting locations: Dr. Payne wants something that feels rough and industrial, like a Slam Poetry theater or a basement comedy club.

Poetry in ASL is a bit different from spoken poetry. You’ve probably picked up a common theme in this episode: comparing ASL to spoken language is a bit more complicated than it seems. Poetry, especially, seems like such an audial thing to us hearers – based in rhyme and rhythm. ASL does all of these things and more in a visual space. Remember the five components of the sign, the most basic unit of ASL, I talked about awhile ago? Rhyme in ASL can work by juxtaposing two similar-looking signs, or two signs with the same palm orientation or style of movement. It’s not about whether or not words sound the same, or if the words in English rhyme – instead, it’s about creating poetry through ASL alone.

By the time this episode airs, the poetry show would’ve gone live, the signed performances taped, the art digitized online. As I’m talking to you, we’re still deep in the production stage, a week or so away from the premiere. Our performers – who include Dr. Payne – are crafting poems at their desks, determining which signs share handshapes, movements, palm orientations, or places of articulation. The end result can look almost like a dance: signs transitioning smoothly into one another, with a performer altering the speed and intensity of their signing as they see fit.

It’s not easy – the idiosyncrasies of ASL, after all, are extremely hard for us to grasp – but they’re making progress. This, Dr. Payne says, is the point: making us struggle with ASL, wrestle with it to learn to respect it for what it is.

On one of my last days of shadowing Dr. Payne, she took Bella and I out for ice cream. We had just passed near a local ski resort – of course closed for the summer – and, as we tried to eat our food quicker than it could melt, Dr. Payne started talking about her brother-in-law again. Her whole family goes out skiing every year – her husband, she says, could be an instructor – but her brother-in-law does it on a whole new level. “He can dance with his snowboard,” she says, the way he moves on the hills. Most of the people on the course, watching him blow past them, don’t even know he’s congenitally deaf.

She worries, though. The workers at the ski resort – the people who would rush to your help if something went wrong and you wiped out – aren’t trained how to sign. If her brother-in-law, or any other Deaf person unable to communicate, falls, what’s to say they’ll be unable to help him, if he can’t describe his symptoms and be understood? Worse, what if they assume, falsely, that he’s been knocked mute by the accident, horrifically disabled, when he’s always lived this way, and been perfectly fine?

“There are so many gaps,” she says, “everywhere.” She’s right, of course. The hearing world, though it’s improving, has much left to do to fully, comfortably integrate Deaf individuals.

And the poetry show’s a part of that first step, she believes, demonstrating to hearing people that Deaf people are more than a group united by a disability – they’re a culture and a history unto themselves, who embody all of the complexities and beauty of the hearing world, and even some we completely ignore. If we can get that across, then maybe the next steps – increasing resources for learning ASL, requiring parents to sign to their Deaf children or find a school where they can be given language, preparing emergency response teams with a basic ASL vocabulary – won’t seem like such a dramatic concession from the hearing world.

We’re pretty much back on campus when I finish my ice cream. I kind of wish I had gotten a larger size – it’s a hot day, and the air is thick and humid. As I get out of Dr. Payne’s car, promising to meet with her for the final few planning sessions, I realize I’m thinking of the sign for more again. On its own, it’s a little strange to sign, devoid of any grammar or larger sentence structure, just a single piece of a grand language in isolation. I walk home as the sun begins to set, tapping my fingertips together, imagining all the other things I can say with my hands.

(slow music, gradually building throughout this section)

And, with that, we close out the first episode of Results & Discussion. I thank everybody for listening. This is an entirely independent podcast – I write, research, edit, and mix everything myself, and perform and produce all of the music you’ve heard today. It’s been a fair bit of work, to say the least, so I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to enjoy it.

If any of this spoke to you, or interested you in any way, I encourage you to check out the corresponding webpage I’ve produced for this episode, linked in this description. There, you’ll find visual aids, a full transcript of the episode, and a bibliography of books, lectures, studies, and more which go deeper into the topics I’ve only brushed the surface of today. Many of these materials were immensely helpful as I was creating this episode.

I regret that I couldn’t have included more voices from Deaf individuals as I was creating this episode. Dr. Payne, though extremely well-versed, still speaks about deafness from an outside perspective – and I, in the last hour, have done the same. While producing this episode, I tried hard to include as many works by Deaf academics and activists as possible, but if you’re interested in learning directly from them, as I did, I implore you to visit this episode’s bibliography. I especially recommend Inside Deaf Culture by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, two Deaf linguists whose work clarified many of my own questions as I was researching for this episode.

Thanks for listening to the very first episode of Results & Discussion. I hope you’ve learned something, and I’m looking forward to speaking to you all next time.

(outro music; a brighter version of the theme from the introductory music)

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

It’s my hope that your learning doesn’t end with Results & Discussion, so I’ve gathered some extra resources to facilitate further research. The bibliography – those sources actually referenced in the episode itself – is first. But I encourage anyone interested to dive into the books, articles, and videos in the “Further Reading” section after the bibliography. The TED Talks are particularly good for anyone interested in short, informative stories from Deaf individuals. Anything underlined has an attached link. If available biographical information about the authors mentions that they are Deaf, this is indicated with a +.

Bibliography

Bauman, H-Dirksen L. Review of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1816-1864. Sign Language Studies, vol. 2 no. 4, 2002, p. 452-459. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sls.2002.0015.

Bahan, Benjamin J. “Non-Manual Realization of Agreement in American Sign Language.” Boston, UMI Diss. Services, 1996.

Butler, Rhett. “How Many People Speak ‘What Languages’ in America.” Mongabay.Com, web.archive.org/web/20170429061742/names.mongabay.com/languages/. Accessed 19 July 2023.

Dillard LK, Arunda MO, Lopez-Perez L, et al. Prevalence and global estimates of unsafe listening practices in adolescents and young adults: a systematic review and metaanalysis. BMJ Global Health 2022;7:e010501. doi:10.1136/ bmjgh-2022-010501 “Infoguides: Deaf Demographics and Employment: Demographics Statistics.” Demographics Statistics - Deaf Demographics and Employment - InfoGuides at Rochester Institute of Technology, infoguides.rit.edu/deafemploy/demographics. Accessed 19 July 2023.

Humphries, Tom, and Carol Padden. Inside Deaf Culture. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Jacobs, R. (1996). Just How Hard Is It to Learn ASL? The Case for ASL as a Truly Foreign Language. In C. Lucas (Ed.) Multicultural As- pects of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series, Vol. J. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. 183-226.

Ruth Campbell and others, Sign Language and the Brain: A Review, The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 2008, Pages 3–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enm035

“Special Education Research and Development Center on Reading Instruction for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students.” Search Funded Research Grants and Contracts - Details, ies.ed.gov/ncser/RandD/details.asp?ID=1325#level. Accessed 19 July 2023.