and Greek and algebra and most of the social graces. She lectured all over the world, interacted easily with Presidents and literary celebrities, and wrote 12 books. Carol Chomsky (1986) studied three children in very similar circumstances, deafened and blinded through illness (usually meningitis and its associated fever) very early in life. “The unusual channel” (as Carol called it) through which language is learned and used by these individuals shows how much can change in the learner’s environment with little consequence for final attainment. To perceive speech at all, the deaf-blind must place their fingers strategically at the mouth and throat of the speaker, picking up the dynamic movements of the mouth and jaw, the timing and intensity of vocal cord vibration, and release of air; the overall method is called Tadoma). From this information, differing radically in kind and quality from the continuously varying speech wave, the deaf-blind recover the same ornate system of structured facts as do hearing learners: for instance, that English has fundamental units including t, p, and a; that these combine into tap, apt, and pat, but not (in principle) tpa, and that these larger units are categorized into classes distributed differently in the sequences that make up sentences. But how are these units, so acquired, to stick to the world that they are meant to describe? It seems almost impossible to imagine how these children make contact with the objects, activities, qualities, and relations, being spoken about by their interlocutors but which they can neither see nor hear. Yet enthusiastically describing a recent field-trip, one of these persons, deaf-blind from 19 months of age, remarks: “I saw one car flattened down to about one foot high … And my mechanic friend told me that the driver who got out of that cab that was squashed down by accident got out by a [narrow] escape.” (in C. Chomsky, 1986, p. 337). So here is language, acquired on a puff of air in a world that ends at the finger tips, complete with embedded relative clauses and including the semantically appropriate use of the word see. How can this sophisticated knowledge be explained when the information supplied by the environment is so different and apparently diminished from the usual case?
and Greek and algebra and most of the social graces. She lectured all over the world, interacted easily with Presidents and literary celebrities, and wrote 12 books. Carol Chomsky (1986) studied three children in very similar circumstances, deafened and blinded through illness (usually meningitis and its associated fever) very early in life. “The unusual channel” (as Carol called it) through which language is learned and used by these individuals shows how much can change in the learner’s environment with little consequence for final attainment. To perceive speech at all, the deaf-blind must place their fingers strategically at the mouth and throat of the speaker, picking up the dynamic movements of the mouth and jaw, the timing and intensity of vocal cord vibration, and release of air; the overall method is called Tadoma). From this information, differing radically in kind and quality from the continuously varying speech wave, the deaf-blind recover the same ornate system of structured facts as do hearing learners: for instance, that English has fundamental units including t, p, and a; that these combine into tap, apt, and pat, but not (in principle) tpa, and that these larger units are categorized into classes distributed differently in the sequences that make up sentences. But how are these units, so acquired, to stick to the world that they are meant to describe? It seems almost impossible to imagine how these children make contact with the objects, activities, qualities, and relations, being spoken about by their interlocutors but which they can neither see nor hear. Yet enthusiastically describing a recent field-trip, one of these persons, deaf-blind from 19 months of age, remarks: “I saw one car flattened down to about one foot high … And my mechanic friend told me that the driver who got out of that cab that was squashed down by accident got out by a [narrow] escape.” (in C. Chomsky, 1986, p. 337). So here is language, acquired on a puff of air in a world that ends at the finger tips, complete with embedded relative clauses and including the semantically appropriate use of the word see. How can this sophisticated knowledge be explained when the information supplied by the environment is so different and apparently diminished from the usual case?
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