Language Deprivation and Deaf Mental Health

by Neil S Glickman

nineteenth-century Manualists were predominantly Protestants who believed sign language was a divine gift (Baynton, 1996, 124).

They thought the language beautiful because of the romanticized belief that sign language could be traced to antiquity and “was similar to painting” (Baynton, 1996, 87).

“dysfluent language,” by which we mean language that native users would easily recognize to be unclear, poorly developed, and substandard for everyday conversational purposes,

we use the term “language deprivation” to explain this phenomenon of deaf children growing up without quality exposure to any fully accessible language.

The characteristic features lacking in the “visual-gestural” language system of those with LDS include tenses, plurals, and standard sentence structures. There is a relative simplification of grammar, so that others must guess at the intended meaning. The nuances involved in this type of guesswork are infinitely intricate and are a primary raison d’être for the specialized field of Certified Deaf Interpreting.3