Entering the world of alternate communications may feel like diving into a bowl of alphabet soup. The goal of many educators has been to bring Deaf children into the world of their hearing peers. Here are a few of the options you may still encounter.
ASL, American Sign Language, is a full and thriving language with its own structure, grammar, idioms, and community-led growth. American English has coined and adopted new words for technology and cultural phenomena, so has American Sign Language. In fact, conversations are occurring across the US now about revising some of the signs commonly used to date. There was also an organic consensus reached for how to express the new century — two thousand or twenty (they settled on twenty).
SEE, Signed Exact English, is a code system using ASL signs for nouns and verbs, adding hand movements to represent prefixes and suffixes, and presenting all signs in English word order. For example, “I went running” would be expressed in ASL with RECENT I RUN, and in SEE with I-on-chest (for “I”) W+past (for “went”) RUN+ I+flourish (for “-ing”). It’s an “Englishification” of ASL used often in academic settings so that English grammar is more familiar to the student. As expected, the additional movements disappear as signers spend more time in the community and ASL fluency overrides the artificial constructs.
PSE, Pidgin Signed English, is where most hearing people who study ASL from books land. ASL signs are used in English word order, generally without the non-manual markers that indicate inflection and punctuation. Messages are transmitted, usually owing to the patience of both parties and the quality of their relationship. It would be similar to spending a month in South America relying on a few semesters of classical Spanish taken in High School.
Sim-Com, Simultaneous Communication, sometimes called Total Communication, is a blending of verbal and signed communication. Unfortunately, both languages suffer in a “Spanglish” kind of way. The idea is that one can sign the words as they are spoken, but there are no signs for articles, prepositions, and plurals, just as there are no words for an eyebrow raise, a nose wiggle, or eye gaze (important elements in ASL). At best, it’s a way for one person to express themselves to a mixed audience where both sides get essential bits of the message.
Cued Speech is a system of hand signals placed around the neck and face to indicate unheard phonetics. For example, there’s a placement and handshape for a hard-c (Cake) and a different one for a soft-c (faCe). The idea is to present the information that can’t be seen by observing the lips and throat.
Rochester Method is all fingerspelling — every word is s-p-e-l-l-e-d- -o-u-t- -o-n- -t-h-e- -h-a-n-d. Honestly, my fingers couldn’t make it through a simple sentence, much less a complete conversation. Meanwhile, the communicator’s intended word is presented without ambiguity. The only thing left is ensuring the reader knows the meaning for that collection of letters.
Bi/Bi, for Bi-Lingual/Bi-Cultural, uses ASL as a whole language and English as a whole language. Just as military and missionary children grow up learning two languages in a foreign country, children in a bi/bi educational setting learn to operate in two languages. Keeping the two separate is not a problem when learned consistently and early. This choice gives Deaf children high access to both worlds, most importantly a visual language they can process their own thoughts in, as well as satisfying the need to communicate with most of the people they’ll encounter in the world at large.