A Man Without Words

Last updated March 12, 2023

A Man Without Words is a book by Susan Schaller, first published in 1991, with a foreword by author and neurologist Oliver Sacks.^[1] The book is a case study of a 27-year-old deaf man whom Schaller teaches to sign for the first time, challenging the Critical Period Hypothesis that humans cannot learn language after a certain age.

The book features in 1,011 WorldCat libraries,^[2] and has been translated into Dutch,^[3] Japanese ^[4] and German.^[5]^[6] The book was reviewed by The Los Angeles Times ,^[7] The New York Times ,^[6] The Boston Globe ,^[8] and The Washington Post ^[9] A second edition, with new material, was published in August 2012 by University of California Press.^[10]

Author

Susan Schaller is a writer, public speaker and human rights advocate located in Berkeley, California.^[11]^{[ better source needed ]} She was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, graduated from San Jose State University in San Jose, California, and earned her master's degree in public health education from the University of North Carolina.^[12]^{[ page needed ]}

Summary

Susan Schaller began studying American Sign Language (ASL) at university in one of the first programs to present ASL classes to hearing students. Schaller recalls that she chose to sit in on this class randomly, and by doing so changed her life.^[13] Five years later, in 1970, Schaller moved to Los Angeles with her husband and became an interpreter for the deaf at a local community college. She was then hired by the 'Reading Skills Class,' a class of deaf adults learning to read English, and it was here that she met Ildefonso. Within a few minutes of introductions, it became clear to her that Ildefonso did not understand her signs as a form of communication, but he diligently copied Schaller's movements hoping to derive some meaning. Ildefonso seemed to see Schaller's signs as commands more than representations of abstract concepts, and for several days appeared to make no progress. It was not until Schaller began signing the word "cat" to an imaginary student that Ildefonso suddenly understood her attempt to communicate meaning, at which point he began to cry.

Schaller worried that Ildefonso would not return to class the next day, but he did. After further sessions Ildefonso began carrying a list of English words in his pocket that, Schaller noted, he treated with the utmost care. After Ildefonso's breakthrough, Schaller found his learning progress very slow, and she worried that he would be unable to acquire language. She then approached linguist Ursula Bellugi at the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, where Bellugi specialized in the biological foundation of language, and language acquisition, with specific reference to ASL. Bellugi told Schaller that she had strong reservations whether Ildefonso could learn language at his present age (because according to the Critical Period Hypothesis language is only properly mastered in youth). Bellugi also noted that none of her students in tests of language acquisition had yet reached puberty, and that she could find no documented cases of an adult learning a first language. Schaller chose to move forward with teaching Ildefonso, as his dedication inspired her. Schaller also noted that Ildefonso was often in charge of determining the direction of the lesson. Schaller found that Ildefonso had no particular difficulty learning simple arithmetic using the numbers one through nine, and later ten and beyond, but the concepts of proper names and time proved more difficult. Schaller also noted that when he was learning colors, green triggered especially strong feelings for Ildefonso.

As time progressed, Ildefonso's progress was still slow, but he was able to communicate with Schaller. In later months stories began to emerge from Ildefonso's past, including a run-in with the border patrol, which explained Ildefonso's anxious response to the color green. In fact, Ildefonso's reaction was so strong that Schaller went to the local border patrol office to question them on their procedures in handling adults without language. At the end of four months, Ildefonso told Schaller that he would have to quit school in order to work.

Throughout her narrative of the four-month period of working with Ildefonso, Schaller touches on many subjects including race, religion, colonization, and Deaf Culture.^[1]

Comparative cases

Schaller compares and contrasts Ildefonso's case with those of other individuals with impaired language or linguistic isolation. They include Peter the Wild Boy, Kaspar Hauser, Victor of Aveyron, and Ishi. Particular attention is given to "Genie," a feral child who was the victim of extraordinarily severe abuse, neglect and social isolation.

Criticism

The first edition of the book was reviewed by author Lou Ann Walker in The New York Times shortly after publication. She complained "It is frustrating not to learn more about Ildefonso and his life in this slim volume," but acknowledged that "[v]irtually nothing has been written about adults without language, but Ms. Schaller makes it clear that their numbers are greater than we think."^[14]

The book has been criticized for Schaller's comparisons between Ildefonso and children like Victor or Genie. Carol Padden writes that Schaller does not do enough to highlight the basic differences between these cases: since Ildefonso was raised by a caretaker and in better conditions than Genie or Victor, and Ildefonso apparently functions socially (in a limited way) that was beyond the capability of these earlier case studies. However, Schaller did at least acknowledge this issue, saying that languagelessness is the only similarity between Ildefonso and the "wild children," and writing, "Deafness is not wildness, and the isolation of languagelessness alone is not the isolation of the woods or a basement or imprisonment on a chair" (Schaller p. 156).

It has also been suggested that the characterization of Ildefonso as entirely "languageless" may be an oversimplification. In the same review, Padden speculates that "Schaller may have been teaching language to Ildefonso, but more accurately, she was teaching him how to map a new set of symbols on a most likely already existent framework of symbolic competence."^[15]

The book has also been criticized for its lack of scientific rigor, especially that Schaller did not perform experiments on Ildefonso to collect data about his cognitive and communicative skills prior to teaching him language. The most strongly-worded critique along these lines might be by linguist Jürgen Tesak, who wrote the following in a review of the book for the journal Language :

"The process of Ildefonso's language acquisition and his lingusitic skills are described unsystematically and anecdotally, if at all. Instead of data, [Schaller] presents many emotional intuitions and wild guesses about Ildefonso's 'languageless' mental world. Thus the claims made by the author in relation to language (acquisition) in Ildefonso do not have a sound empirical basis. [...] given the poor documentation of Ildefonso's language skills and the contradictory information on his linguistic, social, and communicative background, there is no other choice than to treat [Schaller's] book with a maximum of caution."^[16]

Schaller makes no claims as to the scientific rigor of her results, however, and she states on the first page of her introduction, "I am neither deaf nor a linguist" (Schaller p. 17). Not all academics share Tesak's reservations; for example, Schaller's book has been cited by many cognitive scientists without any apparent skepticism.^[17]

Others have countered that Schaller and the topic of languageless adults have been excluded from the field of linguistics. Temple Grandin, a prominent animal behavior scientist, writes:

"The best book on a normal language-less person is A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller. Susan Schaller has spent twenty years travelling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative, or hostile."^[18]

One reviewer noted that the author said that when Ildefonso meets a Deaf person, they exchange more information in a brief conversation with him than she had been able to exchange in weeks. The reviewer concluded that Ildefonso may not have been as "languageless" as Schaller believed.

Adaptations

A short documentary film about Ildefonso and Schaller, with the same title as the book, was produced in 2013 by filmmaker Zack Godshall, whose previous work includes the 2011 Sundance film Lord Byron. This film was shown at the Southern Screen film festival in Lafayette, Louisiana.^[19]

An adaptation of the book for the stage was written by Derek Davidson and premiered by An Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, NC, in July 2015.^[20]

Related Research Articles

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.

Nicaraguan Sign Language is a form of sign language which developed spontaneously among deaf children in a number of schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is of particular interest to linguists as it offers them a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.

Home sign is a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input, these children are referred to as linguistically isolated.

Bilingual–Bicultural or Bi-Bi deaf education programs use sign language as the native, or first, language of Deaf children. In the United States, for example, Bi-Bi proponents claim that American Sign Language (ASL) should be the natural first language for deaf children in the United States, although the majority of deaf and hard of hearing being born to hearing parents. In this same vein, the spoken or written language used by the majority of the population is viewed as a secondary language to be acquired either after or at the same time as the native language.

The critical period hypothesis or sensitive period hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window of brain development to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.

In linguistics, the innateness hypothesis holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis, language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus, the universality of language acquisition, as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However, these arguments have been criticized, and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genie (feral child)</span> American feral child (born 1957)

Genie is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura-Ann Petitto</span> American psychologist and neuroscientist (born c. 1954)

Laura-Ann Petitto is a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist known for her research and scientific discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees, the biological bases of language in humans, especially early language acquisition, early reading, and bilingualism, bilingual reading, and the bilingual brain. Significant scientific discoveries include the existence of linguistic babbling on the hands of deaf babies and the equivalent neural processing of signed and spoken languages in the human brain. She is recognized for her contributions to the creation of the new scientific discipline, called educational neuroscience. Petitto chaired a new undergraduate department at Dartmouth College, called "Educational Neuroscience and Human Development" (2002-2007), and was a Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation and Dartmouth's Science of Learning Center, called the "Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience" (2004-2007). At Gallaudet University (2011–present), Petitto led a team in the creation of the first PhD in Educational Neuroscience program in the United States. Petitto is the Co-Principal Investigator as well as Science Director of the National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center, called the "Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2)". Petitto is also founder and Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (“BL2”) at Gallaudet University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Goldin-Meadow</span> American psychologist

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.

Prelingual deafness refers to deafness that occurs before learning speech or language. Speech and language typically begin to develop very early with infants saying their first words by age one. Therefore, prelingual deafness is considered to occur before the age of one, where a baby is either born deaf or loses hearing before the age of one. This hearing loss may occur for a variety of reasons and impacts cognitive, social, and language development.

Language deprivation is associated with the lack of linguistic stimuli that are necessary for the language acquisition processes in an individual. Research has shown that early exposure to a first language will predict future language outcomes. Experiments involving language deprivation are very scarce due to the ethical controversy associated with it. Roger Shattuck, an American writer, called language deprivation research "The Forbidden Experiment" because it required the deprivation of a normal human. Similarly, experiments were performed by depriving animals of social stimuli to examine psychosis. Although there has been no formal experimentation on this topic, there are several cases of language deprivation. The combined research on these cases has furthered the research in the critical period hypothesis and sensitive period in language acquisition.

When the circumstances of Genie, the primary victim in one of the most severe cases of abuse, neglect and social isolation on record in medical literature, first became known in early November 1970, authorities arranged for her admission to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where doctors determined that at the age of 13 years and 7 months she had not acquired a first language. Hospital staff then began teaching Genie to speak General American English, and she gradually began to learn and use language. Their efforts soon caught the attention of linguists, who saw her as an important way to gain further insight into acquisition of language skills and linguistic development. Starting in late May 1971, UCLA professor Victoria Fromkin headed a team of linguists who began a detailed case study on Genie. One of Fromkin's graduate students, Susan Curtiss, became especially involved in testing and recording Genie's linguistic development. Linguists' observations of Genie began that month, and in October of that year they began actively testing what principles of language she had acquired and was acquiring. Their studies enabled them to publish several academic works examining theories and hypotheses regarding the proposed critical period during which humans learn to understand and use language.

Language acquisition is a natural process in which infants and children develop proficiency in the first language or languages that they are exposed to. The process of language acquisition is varied among deaf children. Deaf children born to deaf parents are typically exposed to a sign language at birth and their language acquisition follows a typical developmental timeline. However, at least 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who use a spoken language at home. Hearing loss prevents many deaf children from hearing spoken language to the degree necessary for language acquisition. For many deaf children, language acquisition is delayed until the time that they are exposed to a sign language or until they begin using amplification devices such as hearing aids or cochlear implants. Deaf children who experience delayed language acquisition, sometimes called language deprivation, are at risk for lower language and cognitive outcomes. However, profoundly deaf children who receive cochlear implants and auditory habilitation early in life often achieve expressive and receptive language skills within the norms of their hearing peers; age at implantation is strongly and positively correlated with speech recognition ability. Early access to language through signed language or technology have both been shown to prepare children who are deaf to achieve fluency in literacy skills.

Vicki Hanson FACM FRSE FBCS, is an American computer scientist noted for her research on human-computer interaction and accessibility and for her leadership in broadening participation in computing.

Amber Galloway is a sign language interpreter specializing in the interpretation of concerts and music festivals, especially rap/hip-hop, into American Sign Language (ASL). She has been described as "..the most recognizable sign language interpreter in the [United States]."

Language deprivation in deaf and hard-of-hearing children is a delay in language development that occurs when sufficient exposure to language, spoken or signed, is not provided in the first few years of a deaf or hard of hearing child's life, often called the critical or sensitive period. Early intervention, parental involvement, and other resources all work to prevent language deprivation. Children who experience limited access to language—spoken or signed—may not develop the necessary skills to successfully assimilate into the academic learning environment. There are various educational approaches for teaching deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Decisions about language instruction is dependent upon a number of factors including extent of hearing loss, availability of programs, and family dynamics.

Susan Curtiss is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Curtiss' main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie, a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI; maturational constraints on first-language development ; hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition; and the cognitive modularity of grammar.

Karen Denise Emmorey is a linguist and cognitive neuroscientist known for her research on the neuroscience of sign language and what sign languages reveal about the brain and human languages more generally. Emmorey holds the position of Distinguished Professor in the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University, where she directs the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience and the Center for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience.

References

1 2 A man without words by Susan Schaller. New York : Summit Books, 1991 ISBN 978-0-671-70310-3 WorldCat
↑ "Schaller, Susan [WorldCat.org]". www.worldcat.org.
↑ De man zonder woorden by Susan Schaller, transl. Aafje Bruinsma. Utrecht: Kosmos, 1993 ISBN 978-90-215-2009-4
↑ 言葉のない世界に生きた男 / Kotoba no nai sekai ni ikita otoko. by スーザン・シャラー著 ; 中村妙子訳. 中村妙子. ( Susan Schaller; transl. Taeko Nakamura) 晶文社, Tōkyō : Shōbunsha, 1993. ISBN 978-4-7949-6124-2
↑ Ein Leben ohne Worte : ein Taubstummer lernt Sprache verstehen by Susan Schaller. München : Knaur, 1992 ISBN 978-3-426-75002-5
1 2 Lou Ann Walker; "All Language Was Foreign" New York Times, February 03, 1991
↑ Thomas Mallon, "And This Shall Be a Sign: A MAN WITHOUT WORDS," Los Angeles Times, Jan 27, 1991
↑ David Mehegan, "Journey into a life without language" Boston Globe, Feb 4, 1991
↑ " Of Triumphs Unspoken" Washington Post, Mar 19, 1991
↑ http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520274914 A Man Without Words at UC Press
↑ Schaller, Susan. "Susan Schaller, et al". susanschaller.com. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
↑ A man without words by Susan Schaller. New York : Summit Books, 1991
↑ "Words that Change the World".
↑ Walker, Lou Ann (1991-02-03). "All Language Was Foreign". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-17.
↑ American Journal of Psychology Vol. 105, No. 4, 1992 (pp.648-653)
↑ Language Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 664-665
↑ See Carruthers, Peter. "The cognitive functions of language." Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2002) 25, 657-726. p. 659; Nelson, Katherine. Language in Cognitive Development: The Emergence of the Mediated Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. p. 359
↑ Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. 2009, 255
↑ "Southern Screen Presents: Zack Godshalls A Man Without Words | KATC.com | Acadiana-Lafayette, Louisiana". www.katc.com. Archived from the original on 2013-11-02. Retrieved 2013-04-07.
↑ "derek davidson playwright | ABOUT". www.derekdavidsonplaywright.com. Retrieved 31 October 2016.