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In what language do deaf people think?
- hunterclarke 16y agoWow that is mind-blowing. I could not possibly imagine a world without words, especially the ones in my head. It goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language.
- frooxie 16y agoReally? I'm bilingual from childhood (and I've since learned a few more), and I seldom feel like I'm thinking in any specific language. Furthermore, I don't see how that could be puzzling to anyone - haven't most people had the experience of temporarily forgetting the word for something that they are very familiar with? A situation where they have a concept in mind, but have forgotten the "label" for it in their language? So why couldn't people think using these wordless concepts instead of with words? (To me, thinking in words seems strange and inefficient. On the other hand, I often have clear and simple thoughts in my head that take me several minutes to translate into any language, because none of the words and expressions I can think of seem just right, so thinking in words seems like it would be useful for communicating.)
- 3pt14159 16y agoPeople think in different ways. I almost never think in "words" because I'm a visual thinker, but my girlfriend absolutely never grasps for a word. I assume the deaf have differences between language based thinker and visual thinkers or kinetic thinkers.
- Niten 16y agoFor my part I know that I don't strictly think in words, or pictures, or any other such representations. I'm sharply aware of this because I'm relatively slow putting thoughts into words; so when I have some thought, I can consciously hold that thought in my head for a moment before the corresponding words come to mind. For instance, suppose I realize I'm out of milk. It'll come to mind that I should go to a grocery this afternoon to buy more milk, but this intention doesn't form as a complete sentence in my head. It may literally take a couple seconds for me to recall the vocabulary I'll need to express this thought in words, but I can continue thinking about my trip to the grocery -- which one I should go to, what else I need to pick up there, etc. -- before any words have even come to my mind. So ideas and their linguistic representations are very distinct to me, and sometimes I don't even bother with the latter at all, because (for whatever reason) forming the linguistic representation of a though imposes a significant overhead on my brain. (I'm also dyslexic, for what it's worth, and I often wonder of these issues are related.) My hypothesis is that for people with better functioning language centers than mine, words may come to mind so easily that the delay between thought and linguistic representation is imperceptible to them, hence they "think in words". But for people like me those words might come late or not at all, but regardless, I do think all the same...
- frooxie 16y agoI don't think it's a dyslexia thing - at least not necessarily. As I wrote below, I also don't think in words, but I don't have any language problems that I know of (at least, I understand 6-8 languages, learned to read extremely early, and spell better than almost anyone I know).
- JBiserkov 16y agoEspecially when I'm thinking fast thoughts - just assembling some concepts in my mind to see if they fit - I switch to English(not my native language) because it's words are shorter.
- sublimit 16y agoI'm a bad speaker because I think so abstractly. I'm already thinking of the following concepts and their relations as I'm speaking, which is why I tend to stutter and pause constantly. I often find myself thinking in English because it has some representations my language doesn't, but there are things I can't conveniently express in English either. Because of this, I've been laying the blueprints for an artificial language of my own that would follow my line of thought. Synesthesia helps.
- zb 16y agoYou should read Richard Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think. There's a really fascinating chapter about this.
- forsaken 16y agoI just ordered this book. I loved "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman" and didn't know there was a sequel. Thanks for the comment!
- tokenadult 16y agoIt goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language. I have met other people who share your intuition, but for me (native speaker of English with normal hearing) and for my wife (native speaker of Taiwanese with normal hearing) it is routine to think visually, with no words at all. We have multiple thinking styles, and quite a bit of our thinking does not involve words. I used to have the intuition that everyone can think visually, until I met people who self-report that they cannot imagine doing so.
- henrikschroder 16y agoSapir-Whorf, is that you? :-)
- nooneelse 16y agoYou can probably get the experience of unworded thoughts if you stop speaking for a few days (or just reduce to very very few words only when necessary). There are religious organizations that do vow-of-silence retreats, or you could go camping alone or with just a couple of other people in a setting in which very little will need to be discussed each day.
- tkahn6 16y agoI've also often wondered if the language one thinks in has any effect on cognition or the "efficiency" of thought (if that even makes sense).
- alan-crowe 16y agoI've tried, briefly, to firm-up the idea in "Sapir-Whorf meets coding theory" http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/10/8848/5161 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/10/8848/5161
- wheels 16y agoThat's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and has largely fallen out of favor in modern (Chomskyan, universal grammar) linguistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoYes, although most people who talk about the SWH don't actually quote what was originally said. The Wikipedia article is pretty good, but should be regarded as a starting point rather than as definitive. There is still some dispute over some of the related issues. I know some linguists who separate SWH from "Linguistic relativity." It is clear that there are ideas we can have without necessarily having the language to express them, but similarly, in groups with fluent polyglots the language in use shifts regularly according to the subject/topic. It seems clear that polyglots will prefer one language over another, and that seems to be correlated with the subject, but research in this subject is hard, and clear, unambiguous and uncontroversial results are rare.
- phuff 16y agoAnd modern, Chomskyan, universal grammar linguistics has fallen out of favor among most post-modern linguists everywhere outside of Boston ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hagananaga 16y ago>He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. It sounds to me like she was thinking out loud, or 'talking' to herself. Thinking would correspond to imagining her hands moving, presumably in far more detail then the rest of us can render internally. Except perhaps for some master craftspeople who use their hands professionally. For example, a few pianists can learn a piece from reading the score alone, away from the keyboard.
- saint-loup 16y ago"Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person." That's trivial. It just means "the mind is a structure inplemented in the brain, so any change in the mind translates into some change in the brain".
- sp332 16y agoIt's just evidence that there is something different.
- rictic 16y agoIt's remarkable if we can observe these differences directly given our currently rather course scanning mechanisms. That may or may not be what the author was saying though.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoNot to nit-pick, intended to help: I think you mean "coarse" rather than "course". After the item here a day or two ago about Garden Path sentences, your comment took me several re-takes to parse correctly.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoSee, that in itself is interesting to me - that you found it hard to parse that sentence because of a misspelling. To me it seemed easy to understand: I think the internal process is that as I read I'm speaking internally to myself and so hear¹ the phonic reproduction, homophones don't matter then, the meaning is clear as in that context "rather course" the path/progression/learning-period meaning of course is nonsensical. Also there's probably something in the couplet "rather coarse" being common and there being few words that can follow rather. I'm pretty good at proof reading but making many homophone (homophonic?) errors in informal writing. --- ¹ I wrote this as "here", lol.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
- 10ren 16y agoCommunities evolve language spontaneously. Evidence of this is a school of deaf children (in Brazil IIRC) who were not taught sign language (due to lack of a teacher, due to budget). They developed their own, which became quite complex and of comparable sophistication to other human languages. Taken with the conclusion of the submission that abstract thought requires language for its development, this leads us to the conclusion that abstract thought - far from an isolated activity - is a consequence of community. It seems to me that it would be possible to develop abstract thought in isolation, but perhaps it would take a genius, in the same way that some mathematicians have developed mathematics in isolation, and it's just that it helps tremendously to have the cultural foundation to stand on. eg. I find it much easier to visualize abstraction, reference and so on, than to say it.
- drinian 16y agoThe school was in Nicaragua, and it's been of great use to researchers: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/22/new-nicaraguan-sign-language-shows-how-language-affects-thought/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/2...
- s-phi-nl 16y agoA similar thing happened in the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in southern Israel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoMy aunt was a deaf-mute (That's what she called herself. I have no idea if the term is pejorative) Her husband, my uncle, was blind. So she would sign things that he couldn't see, and he would yell at her and she couldn't hear them. Made for a great marriage. (Joking aside, it was really interesting to watch them communicate. He would hold her hands while she "spoke" Then she would hold his hands -- so he knew she was there -- while he spoke back to her. Worked very well, actually. They had two beautiful kids that grew up to become advocates and workers in the hearing and sight-impaired communities) It was an amazing family. As I recall, both had jobs outside the home. Both were avid readers, writers, and participated in several civic organizations. I used to love visiting them as a kid.
- shasta 16y agoI think I saw a documentary about your aunt and uncle, with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
- CaliGrowFi 16y agostriaght dope, pretty much sums it up.
- yannk 16y agoLisp
- est 16y ago> Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to. Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it's very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes depicted in movies and sitcoms? As a Chinese, now I can think in languages (dual thinking in Mandarin and English), but in the school days I have developed a totally different, alternative way of thinking process. All Indo-European languages have alphabet to represent syllables, but Chinese is not a language (Mandarin, Cantonese are languages), it's a distinctively unique writing system. Why unique? Its logograms/logographs are not directly linked with phonemes but linked with the meaning itself. When I do thinking and reasoning, I recall a concept by the word's exact character shape and structure, then match with the picture of book pages I memorized, identify the corresponding semantics and then organize my result. This is way faster than thinking in languages like a background voice speaking in my head. Elementary education in China has a technique called 默读, which means read without speaking, after we learned this, later we were taught to get rid of "read" altogether. We only scan the picture of one book page, and cache it as a static picture, then a question is raised about a particular word appeared in that page. We are demanded to recite the context out. This is called memorize-before-comprehend. After decades of training and harsh tests like this, we were totally used to treat thinking as pattern extracting from lines of sentences. This is why Chinese find English grammar funny, a noun is a noun, it should be a static notation of things, easily recognizable universally, why the hell do people invent stuff like plural form to make obstacles for recognizing? Human voices spectrum are way smaller than visual spectrum. And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures? Update 1: Anther reason why Chinese are soooooo obsessed with calligraphy. If some idea is really important we write it in an unforgettable, various artful way so the pattern extracting is even faster. And the calligraphy details contains rich hints and link to related ideas. Update 2: Found out deaf people also have problems with English grammar, similar to the common mistakes Chinese makes http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgasc/_/c0mmn2l http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgasc/_/c0mmn2l
- javanix 16y agoThat's pretty fascinating. At least in my own experience, I talk to myself without actually making any sounds when I am thinking (in my head, so to speak). I never really thought that others would do it differently until this post.
- city41 16y agoDo people generally think in their spoken language? I mean sure I think in English, but not all the time. If I'm doing some serious, deep thinking, my thoughts tend to escape words and just become thoughts (hard to explain). I always assumed that's how everyone thinks.
- Jun8 16y agoStraight Dope's answers are often quite illuminating but on this one they've really dropped the ball. First, consider the statement "I think in English, because that's what I speak." This is an extremely naive view of, what is to linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, etc., a huge enigma, or actually two: 1. Is our thought process based on language, i.e. does it use syntactical transformations that are characteristics of language. Note that introspective evidence immediately reveals that at least part of our thinking are in images. This type of thinking is clearly now linguistic. So, let's limit the question to the other modes of thinking, e.g. reasoning. 2. If the answer to (1) is affirmative, then in what language do we think? Is it our native language? What if we have two native language? What happens for deaf people? If we think in our native tongue, then how strong an influence does it exert on our thought process (i.e. was Whorf right?) AFAIK, (1) is now accepted by most philosophy of language people. (2), however, is a matter of some debate. Some people, like Fodor, claim that we think in an innate language. This position is hard to defend for various reasons. With the recent rise of linguistic relativism (suppressed for about thirty years by Chomsky and his followers) more and more researchers are delving into the question of language of thought and the effect it has on our cognitive processes. For an excellent introductory survey on the philosophical issues, see Murat Aydede's article (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/). If your cup of tea is more along the lines of cognitive psychology/linguistics, check out Lera Broditsky's work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky)
- ph0rque 16y agoMy native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I was 17. I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.
- Jun8 16y agoThink about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)
- lolsmiff 16y agoWhen we are first born, we experience a barrage of new sensations. Our minds automatically integrate this sensory information as perceptual information of the world around us. As we grow older, we begin to form our first abstract concepts of the world in terms of visual images. Humans cannot communicate in concepts, however, and we need a perceptual language (optimally one that we can both see and hear) to do so. Not only does this enable us to communicate ideas and concepts to others, but it also serves as a kind of storage system for the mind, making learning and the formation of complex thoughts much easier. It is generally easier to think in terms of language than abstracts, because language is simply the concrete form of conceptual information. Because deaf people can only visually, not audibly, perceive their language, they are obviously set back in terms of their ability to learn and think audibly. However, because they can still use sign language and understand written language, I would not expect their learning or thinking ability to be lessened by any significant degree.
- kripssmart 16y agoAs a child I started thinking on images and pictures than on words and I had the impression for a long while that everyone does the same. Though I never had any issue with my thinking or hearing or talking, I comparatively had slow speed at putting those thoughts into words. Or in otherwords, my thinking speed exceeded my talking speed. 2 points to mention - 1. Either that speed difference is the reason why my brain developed a different interface for thinking in terms of images and pictures than on words. 2. Or maybe because my brain used images first hand and that’s why my talking speed became slow (since visual network is comparatively faster than words). [A brain scan should tell you the difference] Either way, I just said this to explain that our brain just needs a medium to think or if explained in terms of semantics - a medium to develop the semantic net. The voice that you have in your head is not something with which you are born. It’s something that’s being developed. It’s the same that happens with anyone with a hearing/speaking impairment that the brain will develop a different interface for them to think. For example, most people with autism probably will have a different thinking medium. Not sure if I can say it this way - but I felt that the brain uses ‘its own language’ to develop its thinking ability based on how you are.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoI've mentioned this here before but when formally learning German language for the first time I'd often recall BSL signs (or French words equally) instead of the correct Deutsch word. This indicates to me that the same internal token was indexing all my foreign language words including the signs. Occasionally I'll think with a sign just as occasionally I'll drop in a foreign language word into internal speech. My youngest at 16mo is getting quite a few signs now (and has a couple of recognisable utterances - "dake" (his bro's name in modified form), "what-this", "cheers"(!)). He's pre-vocal but he can express quite a few things and he can attempt to manipulate us using mock cries. This last point to me means he's thinking about what he wants to acquire (chocolate, ice-cream, whatever someone else is eating!). He also makes responses to signals that he's going to defecate and asks for his potty (sometimes, he's just managing to do this now) - again this seems to be relatively complex thought. It would be interesting to me to see if his brain pattern indicates, to those doing the research, a pattern similar to a sign language user or not?
- pfedor 16y agoTo the people who claim that thinking happens in some language or other: how about what's going through your head when you play chess? Is that not thinking by your definition? Or do you really narrate it to yourself, as if you were writing a commentary of the game?
- lookACamel 16y agoSo isn't that like thinking in text?
- astrodust 16y agoExcept without the inner voice reading it back to you with the proper sounds.
- known 16y agoWhy do you need language to think? Isn't brain enough?