A First Language: Whose Choice Is It?

In approaches where the focus is on early efforts to teach spoken language, will the child miss the "critical period" for acquiring any first language?

This is the question posed in Sweden by linguists and psychologists who were concerned about the strict oralism that had persisted there for many years. If the critical period is missed because we are exposing the children only to speech while we wait to observe the effectiveness of training or cochlear implants, they pointed out, we run the risk that many children's limited access to the spoken signal will result in almost no early language (other than the idiosyncratic systems they have pieced together to get by). The Sign Language competence they do acquire when they are later exposed to it will be increasingly less proficient depending on the age it was acquired (Hyltenstam, 1992; Newport and Supalla, 1987). This lack of early first language competence, which has been shown to hamper acquisition of any language, results in the children progressing through their education only "semi-lingual" (Cummins, 1984; Paulston, 1977), and lacking the necessary cognitive, academic language proficiency to do well in school. Hence a cycle of failure for many deaf children (and for the schools for the deaf who receive these children after they have missed early chances at language and literacy, children who by this time are well-acquainted with frustration and failure).

While it is hard to imagine a setting in our world that includes no exposure to spoken language, many deaf and hard of hearing children in the United States today still grow up in environments that provide no exposure to signed language. Since we don't know and can't accurately predict some very important variables at the earliest stages, the possible consequences of even partial deprivation of accessible language at a critical time were important considerations in the decision to make Sign Language part of the early education of Deaf and hard of hearing children in Denmark and Sweden.