Rationale for and Comparison of SEE to Other Systems
Prior to the early 1970s, educational programs for children with a hearing loss were “oral-only” (i.e., adults did not sign when speaking to students with hearing loss; Stedt & Moores, 1990) and teachers of the deaf (TODs) did not sign at school. About that time, sign slowly seeped into use as an educational tool in “total communication” classrooms. ASL was beginning to be offered at the college level for credit, and the concept of “educational interpreter” had not been developed as yet. In most programs, the sign used was not specifically delineated as a particular language or system as ASL had only recently been recognized as a language and forms of manually coded English had just been invented (Gustason, 1990).
As an outgrowth of “the continuing concern about low levels of literacy and other academic skills attained by most deaf students” and “an attempt to teach deaf children the language that would be used in schools” (Marschark, Schick, & Spencer, 2006, p. 9), manually coded invented sign systems were developed. SEE (Gustason et al., 1973), the sign system of focus in this paper, is one such system. The first manual English system, Seeing Essential English or SEE 1 (referred to today as Morphemic Sign Systems or MSS) was designed by David Anthony, a deaf teacher, with input from a team of deaf educators and the parents of deaf children (Gustason, 1990). The other members of the team viewed SEE 1 (MSS) as inadequate. As a result, Gerilee Gustason, a deaf woman and educator, and other members of the original SEE 1 (MSS) team developed Signing Exact English (Gustason et al., 1973), initially referred to as SEE 2, but now simply as SEE. Gustason (1990) delineated the rationale for the invention of SEE as not only due to dissatisfaction with the educational achievement of children with a hearing loss and a desire to use the English language in education but also due to the increasing knowledge of English language development of hearing children and research as to the inability of speech reading to access the grammar of spoken English. At the time of the creation of SEE, research documented that deaf children acquired a smaller vocabulary than their hearing peers. In addition, deaf students’ understanding of the morphological and syntactical rules of English was weak when compared to the understanding and clear pattern of development of their hearing peers. Gustason explained that “many word endings are not visible (e.g., interest, interesting, interests, and interested are nearly impossible to distinguish) and … some involve hard-to-hear sounds” (p. 109). This is an issue that cannot be resolved through speech reading because according to the research she reviewed, only 5% of what was said through speech reading was understood by “otherwise capable deaf children” (p. 109). To address the need to visually represent words fully and accurately, SEE was designed to correspond with the number of morphemes of English (Luetke-Stahlman, 1998). Signs are provided for root words and affix markers (e.g., re-, un-, -ing, -ity, -ness). Different signs exist for different words, so that it is possible to sign electric, electrical, electrician, electricity, and nonelectrical. Both the root word and all affixes are made visually obvious. The hope for this system was that signing English would increase the language, reading, and writing abilities of children who were deaf or hard of hearing (Luetke-Stahlman, 1990). The same author expanded on this concept in the forward of the revised SEE dictionary (Gustason & Zawolkow, 1993) explaining that SEE 2 visually displays figurative, authentic, exact English, which Pidgin Signed English (PSE) cannot.
The basic similarities and differences between SEE and other invented sign systems and ASL are outlined in Table 1. MSS, SEE, and the third manually coded system, Signed English (SE) (Bornstein, 1974, 1990), are both similar and dissimilar in ways that warrant clarification. Users of all three systems speak while they sign. They also represent English semantics and syntax via signs but to different degrees. MSS users attempt to sign almost every syllable of every word that they say. For example, a word such as motorcycle has four sign parts in MSS. Users of the SE system can sign some of the morphology of English, but to a limited degree, because SE represents only 14 signed morphological markers. For example, to say and sign the word unworkable, the user is constrained in SE and can only sign “not work” because SE does not have a sign for the morpheme un. In contrast, users of SEE can choose among 94 morphological markers to make English morphology visual to a deaf student. Because SEE users base the signed component of their utterances on the number of morphemes of a word, an SEE user would manually use three signs for unworkable, one for each morpheme: un, work, and able. As Schick and Moeller (1992) explained, SEE “attempts to represent English literally, and it purports to follow a strict criterion of one sign for one English free morpheme or ‘word’” (pp. 318–319). They went on to note that SEE
follows English semantics and does not borrow from ASL semantics, unlike some other MCE [manually-coded English] systems. For example, the English word run would appear as the same sign in the following phrases even through a different sign would be used in ASL for each one: “a home run”; “a runny nose”; “run for office”; and “a run on the ban” (p. 319).
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Table 1
Basic similarities and differences between Signed Exact English (SEE), other created sign systems, and American Sign Language (ASL)
Both MSS and SEE are based on a “two out of three” rule: If a word is spelled with the same letters and sounds the same, it is signed in the same way, even if the meaning of the two words differs. Thus, the word run is signed consistently in SEE no matter the meaning. SEE uses the manual features common to all sign languages and systems as was first explained by the authors in the first edition of the SEE dictionary (Gustasonet al., 1973). The “two out of three” rule is not utilized in SE or PSE. Instead, when English words have different meanings, they are usually signed in different ways. For more detailed information as to the commonalities and differences of signed language and systems, see Stewart and Luetke-Stahlman (1998).
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