Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 85. kötet (1983)

Tanulmányok - Gleason, Jean Berko: Insights from the Extraordinary: Some New Trends in American Psycholinguistics 140

142 JEAN BERKO GLEASOIf utterances were generally redundant version of his shorter utterances. Thus, a young human might on one occasion say me eat banana, and then, after acquiring more language produce a longer utterance like me eat good banana; Nim, however, signes banana me eat at the three-sign stage, and banana me eat banana at the four-sign stage. Children do not say banana eat baby and baby eat banana interchangeably, but Nim's signing was inconsistent in just this way. Thus, there was no evidence of systematicity in his signing, no apparent structure, and no evidence that chimpanzees possess a grammatical capacity. Terrace also observed films of his own project and of other similar projects and found that in all of them there was a strong tendency for the ape to produce only those signs that the teacher had just previosly made ; very few ape utterances were spontaneous rather than imitated. For all of these reasons Terrace concluded that we must admit the possibility that signing apes, like other trained animals, are responding to subtle cues from their trainers, and that this, rather than any inner linguistic structuring, can account for their use of manual signs. These studies have cost millions of dollars and much effort; one could not suggest that our Hungarian colleagues consider embarking on any similar projects. Sign language American Sign Language (ASL) is the language of the deaf community in the United States. Until recent years, it was thought that this language was a rather primitive vehicle for expressing human thought, and that it was not a true language, but rather a collection of hand signs that gave users no way of expressing subtle grammatical nuances, such as modals or conditionals. It is important to distinguish ASL form other kinds of manual communication systems. ASL is different from pantomime, which consists of rather universal mimetic gestures, and from finger spelling, which uses hand shapes to stand for each letter of the conventional alphabet. It also differs from signed English, which uses a combination of signs and finger spelling to produce sentences that parallel spoken English. ASL is a unique language with a unique history. American sign language, unlike American English, has a French background. It is unrelated to the sign language used in Britain, and in fact users of American and British sign cannot understand one another, while ASL signers who do not know spoken French can nonetheless communicate with French signers who do not know spoken English (Gleason 1979). A historical accident lies behind this strange fact: Toward the end of the 18th century, a French teacher of the deaf, the Abbé de l'Epée, noticed that his deaf students used hand signs to communicate with one another. L'Epée added some grammatical markers of his own, codified and standardized the gestures, and made the resultant system of signs the language of instruction in his school. News of his success with the new method spread to the United States, and in 1816 Thomas Gallaudet, a young minister from Hartford, Connecticut, was sent to France to learn the new system, by a local committee that was concerned with the education of deaf people. Gallaudet studied the French method in Paris and returned to the United States with Laurent Clerc, a French teacher of the deaf who was himself deaf. Together Gallaudet and Clerc established a school in Hartford which they called the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. The school was supported by the