Special education _ Deaf_2 - Essay Example

How Linguistic in ASL and English are similar and how they differ Introduction Various studies have been conducted to draw differences and similarities between ASL linguistics and English language. The Comparative linguistics of ASL language and English language has brought about differences and similarities along lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and discourse. The paper will highlight some of the differences as well as the similarities between the ASL language and English language.

ContentThe linguistics of ASL and English share some common similarities despite the later being a spoken language and the former a sign language. Many languages use compounding as a way of forming new words. ASL also uses compounding during formation of new words. A familiar means of creating new words is that of deriving nouns from verbs. In English language, nouns are formed from verbs by adding suffix or changing the stress on a word (example enjoy and enjoyment). In ASL language, changing the movement patterns associated to a verb can lead to formation of nouns.

Therefore, forming nouns from verbs, show a similarity between ASL language and English language (Karen, 2002 page 15 lines 9 – 14).In English language, sounds that are used in constructing words are meaningless by themselves, which are similar to the signs used in ASL linguistic. With regard to phonological separation, observation is: in both English speech and sign, there exist inventory of phonological components available as the corner stone of word formation, whether multimorphemic or monomorphemic , but merely in sign is series of such components reserved completely for use in multimorphenic, obtained words, as well as inflected words (Ronnie, 1983 page 135 line 252-257).

Signs used in ASL linguistics are constructed from components that are meaningless by themselves and can be combined to form morphemes and words. There are three phonological categories in sign language; hand shape, location and movement that are used to differentiate words with similar signs. Among the major issues which has intrigued linguists is a question of what impact the modality of production/perception has on grammar of language. If at all grammar is viewed as entailing various components, in which modules would modality impacts be observed (Ronnie, 1983 page 226 lines 64-66).

In English Language, the word bat and pat differ on the initial sound but have no inherent meaning by their own. Therefore, the pattern of linguistic form is similar in both ASL linguistic and English language (Karen, 2002 page 23 lines 9 – 17). Despite English language and ASL linguistic sharing common similarities, we can draw some differences between the two. The combination process of forming morphological complex words differs from spoken languages to sign languages. In English linguistics, suffixes and prefixes are used on a word stem to form a complex word.

However, in ASL linguistic a non-concatenative process by which a sign stem is nested within a movement is used instead (OGrady, 2005 page 14 lines 13 – 19). Syllables in ASL linguistics differ from those in the English language. They differ because syllables of ASL linguistics have no onset rhyme distinction while those of English language have. Spoken syllables of the English language can be broken into onsets. Such kind of internal structure is not present in ASL linguistics. Due to lack of internal structure, appearance of resyllabification process is cannot be observed in ASL linguistics (Karen, 2002 page 36 lines 19 – 27).

ConclusionStudy of Linguistic of ASL and English has brought much insight into what many have perceived as similar. ASL linguistic share common phonological structure as English language only the difference being that ASL linguistic has no onset rhyme. The ASL being a sign language, hand shapes, location, and movements are used to create a meaningful word/sentence. The ASL linguistic is a language on its own with its own morphological and grammatical rules. Therefore, we cannot say that ASL linguistic is English language despite them sharing some similarities.

ReferencesKaren, E. (2002). Language, cognition, and the brain, insights from sign language research.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. London. OGrady, W. (2005). How children learn language. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press.Ronnie, B. (1980). Phonological and prosodic layering of non manuals in American sign language:.Purdue Univ. Press.