A Man Without Words

Like a lot of university educated folks, I heard in Psych 101 that once you hit your teens, your capacity to learn languages takes such a nosedive that if you haven't learned by then, you'll never be better than "Me Tarzan, you Jane" no matter how hard you try. I'm not ashamed of accepting this "language expiration date" -- there was no reason not to, and besides, it tracked with my own frustration learning foreign languages. For decades, I accepted this Psych 101 nugget without question. When I started reading A Man Without Words, I had no idea my old Psych 101 nugget's days were numbered. I heard about the book as something a fan of Oliver Sacks would enjoy, and I associated it with Oliver Sack's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, about neurological dysfunction, not Sacks's Hearing Voices, about the deaf. I assumed until I started reading that the "man without words" was aphasic -- had brain damage that prevented him from understanding language. Turns out, though, the book's namesake is deaf and poor and had simply, at 27, never been taught any language. No one had ever bothered. Susan Schaller then proceeded to overturn the Psych 101 sacred cow I never knew I had by describing how she taught this young man the beginnings of ASL over the course of a few weeks. Then, so I couldn't think of him as a freak or fraud, Schaller goes on to show that many deaf people receive no language training and can also be taught to sign long after the Psych 101 "language expiration date."Schaller claims that almost every deaf teacher, and most hearing teachers, of ASL know of adults who have grown up without language. While her book is anecdotal and therefore fundamentally unscientific, she makes a passionate plea for academic study of the acquisition of language by adults, which makes her more plausible than those who would brush science aside where it does not prove their case. A Man Without Words is a powerful request, and a strong basis, for further research in this area.A Man Without Words is also very well written. Schaller is both artful and precise in her descriptions of sign idioms and grammar, to the point that I, who know little of sign other than what I read here and in Hearing Voices, felt I understood what I needed to and enjoyed learning it. Her narrative case study is better written than many novels, and besides being fascinated by the information Schaller imparts, I also became submerged in the story.Learning that something I believed for decades may be dead wrong gives me a feeling of loss of equilibrium (I got the feeling a lot when I first started reading about urban legends). No matter how skeptical I try to be, I always seem to be assuming something. A Man Without Words is a convincing argument for skepticism about the "language expiration date," and it raises concerns that the "expiration date" idea may make us give up up too quickly on languageless adults. It is also a fascinating read as a story, which makes the l

This book really opened my eyes to the world of adults without a communication system. I just took for granted the fact that everyone had a way of communicating when in fact, this book shows clearly that there are many who don't have just that. In addition, this book is a real page turner and packs a lot of interesting information in just a little over 200 pages.

If you like the always-probing, thoughtful case studies of Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Seeing Voices), you'll find this encounter between an interpreter for the deaf and a young deaf man with no language to be moving and provocative. The standard cliches about language, thinking, and development (e.g., you can't learn a language after age 5 or 7 or 14; you can't think abstractly without language; and language is what makes us distinctively human) are challenged and exploded by Schaller's account.The book is also simply and beautifully written. Not a wrong note in it.

A must read for people interested in the Deaf and in Deaf culture. This book really puts a hearing person as close to being in the skin of a misunderstood Deaf person as I can imagine. I still get goose bumps when I tell people about or think about the episode of "the moment of realization." Very well done. A very touching and sad/happy story.

A chance meeting brings an adult Mayan Indian who knew no oral nor sign language together with the author, a sign language interpreter. In a story as remarkable as that of young Helen Keller, Idilfonso breaks out of 28 years of silence into a world of sign language. Schaller's book raises insightful questions about the nature of human language and the way language shapes our capacity to perceive our world. A significant book important to all those working with people who use sign language.