Can one's native medium of language be written, rather than spoken or signed?

Question

(This is probably a poorly-formed question, but I'm really just trying to find out if there's any research in this area.)

Most children pick up a spoken or signed language at an early age, and this gets referred to as their native language. Can a person's native language be in the written medium, rather than the signed or spoken?

I'm asking based on my own experience, so this is purely anecdotal. When I was a child, I didn't start speaking until later than expected. Then, in an incident that surprised everyone, when I was two, my parents discovered that I knew how to read when I asked them what "carbohydrates" meant off a cereal box. Decades later, when speaking to my wife, I often realize I don't know how to pronounce a word that I've been using all my life -- because I've been using it in writing, not in speaking.

Is there any research at all looking at children picking up written language before or in conjunction with spoken language? Is there any research on children learning written language on their own?

Answer 1

Probably even the visual learning you had only happened because you were spoken to, even if you didn't speak yourself. It is not unusual that someone does not know how to pronounce a word he/she knows how to write or the opposite, not knowing how to write a word he/she uses in spoken language

You can learn a language through visual or acustic signifiers – be it English, Portuguese or other.

The thing is, it is hard to teach written language to deaf children, at least concerning the kind of writing we are using here, because it is "sound based", i.e., letters correspond to sounds. So a deaf person in general needs to go through an "oralization" process, to learn reading and writing well.

As to pictographic writing, like chinese, maybe it could be learned withouth oralization, but this is just a speculation, as I have no experience with this.

Answer 2

I greatly doubt that it could. Evidence from acquisition suggests that children are primed to extract speech from ambient noise as neonates. Acquisition of sign languages is commensurate with acquisition of spoken languages. However, the neural basis of reading is so delayed that some professional advice is that little is lost, and something may be gained, by not teaching children to read until the age of seven.

Answer 3

I think if people were exposed to written language from infancy in situations to provide context, in the same way that most are exposed to spoken or sign language, they could probably become fluent readers, although writing is a lot harder than speaking or signing just because it requires use of a tool.

The most difficult part of this hypothetical situation would probably be that of the already fluent speakers, instead of the baby's. The easiest way I can think of to make this all possible would be to cary around a dry erase board and a marker wherever you go.

Answer 4

Hmmm .... it has been/is common for educators of deaf children to demand that their charges learn the written form of language in place of the spoken language that they have no access to. This is/has often been accompanied by extreme measures taken to assure that the child NEVER SIGNS! (ask any deaf person for horror stories about this). By all accounts, this practice has been a miserable failure. So, no.

The reading process depends on the use of Phonemic Awareness to perform Phonological Recoding, both of which require a pre-existing language for analysis. Extracting “minimal distinctive units” from writing doesn't seem possible.

a good reference: How do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?