STRUCTURE continued...

Learnability
From the beginning it has seemed that deaf children can read SSW without even being taught, and in the absence of research, anecdotal evidence is accumulating that this is indeed the case (Kegl, 18 Aug 1999). It seems astounding that this has not attracted researchers, especially in view of the immense effort and misery connected with teaching deaf children to read. Yet this is what we should predict given that SSW is essentially a picture of the sign.

We know that there are several prerequisites to reading alphabetic script. First one must memorize the arbitrary symbols of the alphabet. Then one must learn to break words up into segments, a skill called phonologic awareness, something no one seems able to do without being taught (Rayner & Pollatsek 336). Both these requirements apply in the case of SN.

In a visual language however, phonologic awareness is automatic in a sense--no one needs to be taught to see an extended finger. SSW takes advantage of this as much as possible by using symbols that needn't be memorized. All that is required of the learner is to match a mental image of the sign they already know with the mental image of the picture they are looking at. Of course some parts of SSW are arbitrary, and must be learned. The hand shapes and locations can be treated as maps, but we can't draw a picture of movement. Just as we predict, the movement symbols are the parts that deaf learners "must learn", whereas the hands and face are read
automatically, without their having to be taught (Lourdes Toulette, personal communication Oct 21 1999) (Figure 17).

Figure 17. Ease of Learning Various Scripts.

= Obvious without Instruction

X = Must be Taught

	English Roman Alphabet	Stokoe Notation	Chinese Characters	Sutton SignWriting
Ordering of symbols		X
Linguistic level of script	X	X
Separate words into Phonetic parts	X	X
Memorize the symbols	X	X	X

If a child knows how to sign, to a large extent they can read SSW without having to be taught. No other script in the world can make this claim.