IELTS Reading 38: The Silent Grammar

Adapted from Science / Child Development research review (2025-2026). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adx3487

🎧 Audio

🎧 Listen to the audio

🎧 Listen to the audio

🎧 Listen to the audio

Reading Passage

A. For much of the twentieth century, the hand movements used by deaf people to communicate were not taken seriously as language. They were dismissed as a loose collection of gestures and pantomime — a convenient stand-in for the real thing, which everyone assumed must be spoken. Schools went further, forbidding children from using their hands at all and forcing them to imitate speech they could not hear, on the grounds that signing might hold them back from integrating into the hearing world. In some countries the prejudice was so strong that a deaf child caught signing in class was punished, and sign languages themselves were driven underground and passed on only within isolated communities of deaf pupils who met at boarding schools. That attitude now looks like a catastrophic mistake. Decades of careful research have shown that a signed language is a complete, rule-governed system, every bit as complex and expressive as French or Japanese, and that the brain treats it as language — not as a peculiar kind of mime. The modern study of sign language is, in effect, the story of a grammar that was hiding in plain sight.

B. The evidence begins with children. A deaf child born to deaf parents, who themselves sign, passes through the same milestones of language development, at the same ages, as a hearing child babbling and then speaking. The child gestures "babble" in the hands, producing rhythmic, meaningless combinations of movements that precede the first meaningful signs, just as oral babble precedes the first words. By the third and fourth years, such a child is assembling signs into sentences that obey a consistent spatial grammar, in which the location and direction of a movement on the hands mark who did what to whom — information that spoken languages encode in word order and endings. Because hands can move several features at once, a single sign packs handshape, location, movement and facial expression into one instant, a simultaneity that no spoken sentence can match. No parent teaches these rules explicitly, any more than a hearing parent diagrammes sentences for a toddler; the child extracts them from exposure. The orderly progression proved that signing was not merely miming but a language acquired by the same human instinct that drives speech, an instinct that turns out to be far broader than the mouth and the ear.

C. Neuroimaging has since confirmed what child development suggested. Although sign language enters through the eyes rather than the ears, it activates the same left-hemisphere networks in the brain that spoken language uses; the location matters less than the structure being processed, and damage to those areas produces the same kind of grammatical breakdown seen in aphasia after a stroke. Experienced signers also turn out to see the visual world differently. Eye-tracking studies show that they fixate on the face of a person signing, watching the expression and the small movements around the mouth that carry grammar, whereas hearing non-signers, who lack the grammar to interpret what they see, look instead at the hands moving in space. A large longitudinal study of over a hundred deaf children found that those who had sign language from their deaf parents early in life showed significantly faster growth in working memory than those who did not — a cognitive advantage that seemed to ride on how well they understood the language itself, rather than on hearing aids or other technical factors.

D. The darker side of this research concerns what happens when that early access is denied. Roughly nine out of ten deaf children are born to hearing parents who do not sign, and many such children go through their first years with only fragmentary, poorly formed language input — a few improvised home signs, some lip-reading, scraps of speech. The longer a child goes without exposure to any structured language, the more lasting the damage turns out to be. Adults who learned a sign language only late in life do not process it with the language centres of the brain at all; they fall back on the visual and motor areas that ordinary people use to watch hands gesture, and they show measurable differences in the anatomy of the very regions that native signers use fluently. Beyond the laboratory, the same deprivation is linked to later difficulties with literacy, employment and social connection, and to a higher risk of poverty and poor health in adult life, outcomes that follow the deaf person for decades rather than months. Language, this work reminds us, is not a luxury that can safely wait until a child is old enough to choose.

E. The practical message has slowly penetrated education and policy. Early exposure to a sign language — whether from deaf parents, signing teachers, or hearing parents who make the effort to learn — is now understood to be a developmental necessity, not a second-best fallback. Caregivers, the research shows, support signing children through joint attention just as hearing parents do, using visual and even tactile cues to direct a child's eyes to an object before naming it, and a separate line of work suggests that fingerspelling — the hand alphabet used to spell out words letter by letter — may give deaf children a bridge to printed reading that hearing children build through sound. None of this argues against cochlear implants or spoken education, which continue to help many children hear and speak, nor does it claim that signing is always the right path for every family. It argues, rather, against the historical assumption that a language must be heard to be real. The grammar was always in the hands; what changed over a century was the willingness of science to look, and to listen.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. How deaf children acquire sign language on the same schedule as hearing children ii. The long shadow of early language deprivation iii. Why schools banned signing in the nineteenth century iv. Brain and eye evidence that sign is real language v. How signers read letters from the hands vi. The practical message for parents and educators vii. The history of cochlear implants

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. How were signed languages once regarded? A. As fully grammatical languages. B. As mere gestures and pantomime. C. As easier than spoken languages. D. As a form of writing.

6. What did studies of deaf children of deaf parents show? A. They acquire language later than hearing children. B. They pass through the same developmental milestones at the same ages. C. They never learn to read. D. They prefer speaking to signing.

7. According to neuroimaging, how does the brain process sign language? A. It uses the right hemisphere only. B. It activates the same left-hemisphere networks as spoken language. C. It uses no brain regions at all. D. It treats sign as pure visual motion.

8. What did the large longitudinal study find? A. Early sign access was linked to faster working-memory growth. B. Deaf children had worse memories than hearing children. C. Working memory did not develop at all. D. Only hearing parents could teach signing.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents who do not sign.
10. Adults who learn a sign language late use the same language centres as native signers.
11. Joint attention can be supported using visual and tactile cues.
12. The writer argues that cochlear implants should be banned.
13. Fingerspelling has no connection to reading for deaf children.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Although sign language reaches the brain through the (14) __________ rather than the ears, it activates the same left-hemisphere regions as speech. The longer a young child waits before any structured language, the more severe the lasting effects of language (15) __________.

Answers & Explanations

← Previous | Back to IELTS Focus | Next →