11 ms·

How Deaf People Think

107 points by srean 16y ago

srean 16y ago
There has been some very nice discussion on deafness here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 I picked up helpful tips from there. I have limited hearing on one side and lost it fairly late (in my teens). So I do think in a verbal language, however I also picture/visualize things and not always speak to myself in words. This has a weird consequence that, if I am unexpectedly asked to explain the thought process sometime, I have to struggle for words. One perennial but minor difficulty is telling time, as sense of time is mostly visual to me, I do not tell myself the time. But I do not know if this idiosyncrasy is deafness related or not.
- Mz 16y ago
  You don't have to be deaf to think in pictures. My oldest son thinks in pictures. He also has no sense of time and some other issues. I don't recall if these two things are specifically related. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures and wrote a book with basically that title ("Thinking in Pictures"). My son has to translate spoken words he hears into pictures to understand them and then translate pictures in his head into spoken words. This need for translation means he sometimes has the kinds of misunderstandings with people that you typically see from someone who speaks English as a second language. (And, in fact, he was a late talker -- and was basically pushed into it by mom enrolling him in preschool.) These days, there is a fair amount of literature on things like lack of time sense and thinking in pictures. Here is what my son once said about living with no sense of time: http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml
sp332 16y ago
Those born deaf and not taught sign language might not learn a language to think in at all. http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/ http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag... I walked up to him and signed, "Hello. My name is Susan." He tried to copy that and did a sloppy rendition of "Hello, my name is Susan." Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t language. And I was shocked. He looked Mayan and I thought, well, if he knew Mexican sign language, he wouldn’t try to copy. That’s not a normal thing to do, even if you don’t know the language.
- grourk 16y ago
  Those born deaf and not taught sign language will invent their own sign language. There are no human cultures without language. Spoken (or signed) language is natural for humans, and developed as a form of telepathy. I can get a thought that's in my head into your head over a great distance transmitted over noisy media in a short time with a few words. But the thought in my head isn't in the form of an extremely ambiguous language like English or ASL or whatever I happened to learn as a child. It's the other way around: the thoughts come first. Check out The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker for a nice overview on the scientific understanding around this.
  - bugmenot 16y ago
    I may be completely misremembering this, but I think in a psych class I took we were told of feral children who never had a language (tho the one we saw did bark and growl, as she was raised by/around dogs) and the hugely negative effect that had on their brain development. Now, you said "there are no human cultures without language", and I'd agree with that (how can one have a culture without a language?), but I'm not sure I'm fully convinced by idea that all of those born deaf and not taught sign language will invent their own.
  - jbrennan 16y ago
    The book Adam's Tongue by Derek Bickerton chronicles one view of how language evolved in humans and in doing so, evolved humans along with it. It's pretty fascinating. The book explains how our brains wouldn't really have the "thoughts" you speak of without having had language in the first place. I'm not sure precisely how this fits in to children who can't speak and who were never taught to sign, but my guess is it would introduce considerable mental stumbling blocks.
BoppreH 16y ago
I think the issue is similar with bilingual people. Since I started speaking English, my thoughts regularly switch from one language to another, especially when I can't remember the word I want in that language. It's also a great exercise during the learning process. But what caught my attention in the article was the link between language and self-awareness. I think it makes sense: the more complex ideas you can convey to other people, the more complex ideas you can convey to yourself too. Maybe that's what make us different from the other animals?
- riledhel 16y ago
  ever dreamt in English? until you reach that point, dreaming in a foreign language, you didn't really grasp the other language.
  - apl 16y ago
    I doubt that. For instance, I started dreaming in English way before becoming fluent.
  - BoppreH 16y ago
    Now that you mentioned, I don't remember a single instance of a person speaking in my dreams. But I can't figure out if it was just a lack of language as general or if people communicated telepathically. Either way... that's unsettling.
    - wahnfrieden 16y ago
      I've definitely had dreams with people speaking to me, but even in a language I'm learning -- the strange thing is that I can remember struggling to parse and comprehend what they were saying, as if their level of speaking ability was a bit higher than my own.
  - Jach 16y ago
    Dreaming in another language may be a sign you're still just a beginner, I don't know. I remember reading that when you have the Tetris Effect (which is awesome) it's because your brain is still trying to figure out all the rules of shape patterns, and that experts who play all the time don't have the Tetris Effect.
bhickey 16y ago
I had two deaf grandparents. My grandmother lost her hearing to meningitis around age 12, while my grandfather went deaf through his work as a machinist (presumably in his 20s). Her deafness was profound -- the only time I ever saw her react to sound was when balloon burst beside her. His was a bit better and could interpret some sounds with a hearing aid. Neither of them knew ASL, but were fluent lip readers [They met at lip reading class!] To some extent I believe that my speech was influenced by their deafness. To make myself understood I needed to face them and an enunciate. Stories aside, this article is a bit strange: It is quite common for deaf people, when they are dreaming, to not only communicate in their dreams using sign language, but also to communicate telepathically and sometimes even verbally even though they may not know how to speak verbally in the waking world.
- srean 16y ago
  I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and they assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication. I have always been skeptical of it and never understood how would anyone even figure that out or verify it. The paragraph you quoted gives me an anchor point and suggests it might be true. I have a friend who was very nervous about speaking in English, but he dreamed fluently in it. We knew because he talked a lot, rather continuously, in his sleep. Extrapolating that I can imagine a deaf person dreaming verbal communication.
  - a-priori 16y ago
    I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication. I haven't heard this one before, but it wouldn't surprise me. Children up to age 7 or so can't appreciate the fact that other people's experiences are any different from theirs (egocentrism). This is why kids will do things like bury their faces and say "you can't see me!". They don't understand that just because they can't see you, you can still see them. It's not a big stretch from there to them believing that if they hear their internal monologue, that other people hear it as well.
    - 16y ago
jamesbkel 16y ago
Great book if you're interested in further reading http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-About/dp/0743247132 http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-About/d...
terhechte 16y ago
This is very similar to what Socialogist George Herbert Mead proposed in his grand theory of "Social Behaviorism" (1934): "Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, or more specifically, social interaction. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themselves. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, and thus through language we become other to ourselves.[16] In joint activity, which Mead called 'social acts', humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions (e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing, hiding/seeking, talking/listening). In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead) He proposed that organisms first experience or see themselves as an object (or perceive themselves at all, thus stepping over the instinct-border) when they use their voice and hear their voice at the same time and see that others react to that voice too. Even though it is very theoretical it makes for good and interesting reading.
delackner 16y ago
Can anyone confirm this last (supremely fascinating) quote at the end of the article? " In sign languages such as BSL, you’d use your hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. to express things like that the walk was on a dirt road; it was nice out; and you enjoyed the walk, with it all expressed simultaneously. This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put into print, though attempts have been made. "
- andrewce 16y ago
  Confirmed. Adding such sensory detail to narrative descriptions is pretty easy to do in American Sign Language (I can't speak for BSL or others, though French Sign Language is pretty close to ASL, from what I understand). I'm no longer good enough with ASL that I can do all that simultaneously (I'm a native speaker as a result of 8 years at a school for the deaf, but use spoken/written English all but one or two days out of the year).
- kbutler 16y ago
  The failure of print to convey the richness of language is not unique to sign - we're just used to the limitations. Consider the difficulty people have with expressing rich communication via email compared with vocal conversation, and again compared to face-to-face communication. It is fascinating that additional factual details can be conveyed in sign, but it is inaccurate to believe that print can encapsulate the richness of direct personal communication. kb
jamesbressi 16y ago
A must read--both the article AND discussion here. This article and the discussions below are truly one of the more fascinating topics to be had. It is always great to read amazing topics submitted to HN (which is a large portion of the point here, right?) and to read comments for better understanding and discussion (which is the other potion here), but to have both an intriguing article matched with equally thought-provoking and explorative discussion is a complete intellectual gem.
6ren 16y ago
There's a thought here that part of our fundamental intelligence is cultural, and without that language, our brains are seriously incomplete. What is even more amazing (and somewhat relieving in its robustness) is that human communities develop language spontaneously. There's the famous case of a school of deaf children in Nicarangua, who, lacking teachers, spontaneously developed their own language. Apparently, with complex grammar and so on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language I find this profoundly hopeful, in what it shows about people. Also 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... (via sp332's link) Even in this article, there is mentioned "homesign" or "kitchensign", though I imagine it is very limited, and would tend to lack abstractions, complex grammar and so on, being used by a small (ie family) group, for domestic purposes, and while the child is very young.
sarenji 16y ago
I'm so deaf I can't hear much of anything, even with hearing aids. I never learned American Sign Language. I lip-read terribly. I also have an inner voice. I read at a grade level above hearing peers. I understand puns. How did that happen? I learned Cued Speech[1]. It's not mentioned anywhere in this article. It's a system that, summed up in a few words, uses signs for phonemes. Because of this, I could learn English within English. And when I took Spanish classes, I learned Spanish within Spanish. I also dream in verbal words. Even after I learned ASL, I still dream verbally. The words are always quiet, a bit muffled -- this is how I heard things early in life, with hearing aids (I have a cochlear implant now). Occasionally I see captions, as if it's a TV show. A last note. In the article it mentions little d and big D deaf; the way I learned it is that little d deaf people are deaf people in general, and big D deaf is the Deaf culture and community. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech
esoteriq 16y ago
Long-time lurker here - this is one of the first articles that I've felt compelled to respond to. I have a unique perspective on deafness and language. I was born profoundly deaf (so deaf that audiologists proclaimed me as the deafest child ever - what an honor). I learned ASL when I was six months old. To preface - I was incredibly lucky to have parents who learned an entire new language for me (they were immigrants, so it was no easy task for them) and noticed my deafness early. I also got a cochlear implant, which enables me to hear speech fairly well. Over the years, I've learned how to speak and listen well enough to converse with most people. I've also managed to maintain my fluency in ASL - it's a very important part of who I am. According to my mother, I was able to express my desires (I want orange juice, my diapers need changing, etc.) as early as 8 months. So, I was able to talk to my parents at a different level than hearing infants of the same age. I have plenty of deaf friends who were not as lucky. Some of them had hearing losses that were not discovered until they were more than two years old. Some of them just had parents who didn't want to or could not learn ASL. Their performance, academic and otherwise, has lagged behind their hearing peers. I find that their thoughts are not as organized as someone who learned language early on (regardless of form), so some of their actions don't have "common sense." Frankly, the benign neglect I see with deaf children is shocking and quite depressing. It makes me grateful for what I had growing up. This article also made me think about how different my thought process is from hearing people's processes. Even after years of using speech as my main mode of communication, ASL still influences my thoughts quite heavily. For example, I tend to think about spatial matters in ASL - i.e. how a street is laid out. Also, I tend to think about emotions in ASL, complete with facial expressions. On the other hand, with more technical issues such as the law (I'm a lawyer), I'll think in words, even spoken words sometimes. In all and all, I'm grateful that I was able to learn ASL so early and transition to spoken language. ASL really enriched my life - culturally and mentally - and I'm very glad that ASL was my first language.
- cloudwalking 16y ago
  Can you tell us more about the cochlear implant? I've never met someone who has one (that I know of).
  - 16y ago
beefman 16y ago
>This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put into print, though attempts have been made. I sense opportunity...
IsaacSchlueter 16y ago
Good article. One correction, however: One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages, such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions outside of hand and finger gestures. ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a mouth morpheme and a hand gesture. If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.
- seiji 16y ago
  I agree. Saying ASL only uses hand gestures is like saying speaking only uses vibrations of molecules in the air. The world would speak like those strange text-to-speech animated bear videos. ASL + Expression: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OL33OEW6QA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OL33OEW6QA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKnQjBf8wM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKnQjBf8wM
- esoteriq 16y ago
  Yeah, that comment didn't really make sense to me either. I'm fluent in ASL, and I have a working knowledge of BSL. What I can tell is that ASL is more conceptual than BSL. BSL tends to track the English language more closely. For example, ASL will have one sign that expresses an entire sentence, but BSL will most likely have individual signs reflecting the individual words in the sentence. (This is not always true, of course.) All of sign languages depend primarily on gestures and facial expressions.
TravisLS 16y ago
There was an excellent episode of Radiolab about this subject. If you have the time or inclination to listen to an hour long podcast, I highly recommend "Words": http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/ http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/
pnathan 16y ago
This is fascinating. Of particular note to me is the conception that sign language operates in parallel, rather than in sequential. Written language is sequential. In the computer domain, parallelism is, in my experience, best expressed in circuit diagrams and sequence diagrams. This is in the picto-ideagraphical realm, which is the realm of sign languages. Of course visual programming languages have a long and distinguished history of living in a niche. But I wonder if there is a radically awesome visual programming language expression out there that is sufficient.
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Similar discussion from eight months ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 Extremely interesting subject, extremely interesting discussion, with many great insights.

107 points by srean 16y ago

srean 16y ago

There has been some very nice discussion on deafness here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 I picked up helpful tips from there. I have limited hearing on one side and lost it fairly late (in my teens). So I do think in a verbal language, however I also picture/visualize things and not always speak to myself in words. This has a weird consequence that, if I am unexpectedly asked to explain the thought process sometime, I have to struggle for words. One perennial but minor difficulty is telling time, as sense of time is mostly visual to me, I do not tell myself the time. But I do not know if this idiosyncrasy is deafness related or not.

Mz 16y ago
You don't have to be deaf to think in pictures. My oldest son thinks in pictures. He also has no sense of time and some other issues. I don't recall if these two things are specifically related. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures and wrote a book with basically that title ("Thinking in Pictures"). My son has to translate spoken words he hears into pictures to understand them and then translate pictures in his head into spoken words. This need for translation means he sometimes has the kinds of misunderstandings with people that you typically see from someone who speaks English as a second language. (And, in fact, he was a late talker -- and was basically pushed into it by mom enrolling him in preschool.) These days, there is a fair amount of literature on things like lack of time sense and thinking in pictures. Here is what my son once said about living with no sense of time: http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml

sp332 16y ago

Those born deaf and not taught sign language might not learn a language to think in at all. http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/ http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-languag... I walked up to him and signed, "Hello. My name is Susan." He tried to copy that and did a sloppy rendition of "Hello, my name is Susan." Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t language. And I was shocked. He looked Mayan and I thought, well, if he knew Mexican sign language, he wouldn’t try to copy. That’s not a normal thing to do, even if you don’t know the language.

grourk 16y ago
Those born deaf and not taught sign language will invent their own sign language. There are no human cultures without language. Spoken (or signed) language is natural for humans, and developed as a form of telepathy. I can get a thought that's in my head into your head over a great distance transmitted over noisy media in a short time with a few words. But the thought in my head isn't in the form of an extremely ambiguous language like English or ASL or whatever I happened to learn as a child. It's the other way around: the thoughts come first. Check out The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker for a nice overview on the scientific understanding around this.
- bugmenot 16y ago
  I may be completely misremembering this, but I think in a psych class I took we were told of feral children who never had a language (tho the one we saw did bark and growl, as she was raised by/around dogs) and the hugely negative effect that had on their brain development. Now, you said "there are no human cultures without language", and I'd agree with that (how can one have a culture without a language?), but I'm not sure I'm fully convinced by idea that all of those born deaf and not taught sign language will invent their own.
- jbrennan 16y ago
  The book Adam's Tongue by Derek Bickerton chronicles one view of how language evolved in humans and in doing so, evolved humans along with it. It's pretty fascinating. The book explains how our brains wouldn't really have the "thoughts" you speak of without having had language in the first place. I'm not sure precisely how this fits in to children who can't speak and who were never taught to sign, but my guess is it would introduce considerable mental stumbling blocks.

BoppreH 16y ago

I think the issue is similar with bilingual people. Since I started speaking English, my thoughts regularly switch from one language to another, especially when I can't remember the word I want in that language. It's also a great exercise during the learning process. But what caught my attention in the article was the link between language and self-awareness. I think it makes sense: the more complex ideas you can convey to other people, the more complex ideas you can convey to yourself too. Maybe that's what make us different from the other animals?

riledhel 16y ago
ever dreamt in English? until you reach that point, dreaming in a foreign language, you didn't really grasp the other language.
- apl 16y ago
  I doubt that. For instance, I started dreaming in English way before becoming fluent.
- BoppreH 16y ago
  Now that you mentioned, I don't remember a single instance of a person speaking in my dreams. But I can't figure out if it was just a lack of language as general or if people communicated telepathically. Either way... that's unsettling.
  - wahnfrieden 16y ago
    I've definitely had dreams with people speaking to me, but even in a language I'm learning -- the strange thing is that I can remember struggling to parse and comprehend what they were saying, as if their level of speaking ability was a bit higher than my own.
- Jach 16y ago
  Dreaming in another language may be a sign you're still just a beginner, I don't know. I remember reading that when you have the Tetris Effect (which is awesome) it's because your brain is still trying to figure out all the rules of shape patterns, and that experts who play all the time don't have the Tetris Effect.

bhickey 16y ago

I had two deaf grandparents. My grandmother lost her hearing to meningitis around age 12, while my grandfather went deaf through his work as a machinist (presumably in his 20s). Her deafness was profound -- the only time I ever saw her react to sound was when balloon burst beside her. His was a bit better and could interpret some sounds with a hearing aid. Neither of them knew ASL, but were fluent lip readers [They met at lip reading class!] To some extent I believe that my speech was influenced by their deafness. To make myself understood I needed to face them and an enunciate. Stories aside, this article is a bit strange: It is quite common for deaf people, when they are dreaming, to not only communicate in their dreams using sign language, but also to communicate telepathically and sometimes even verbally even though they may not know how to speak verbally in the waking world.

srean 16y ago
I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and they assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication. I have always been skeptical of it and never understood how would anyone even figure that out or verify it. The paragraph you quoted gives me an anchor point and suggests it might be true. I have a friend who was very nervous about speaking in English, but he dreamed fluently in it. We knew because he talked a lot, rather continuously, in his sleep. Extrapolating that I can imagine a deaf person dreaming verbal communication.
- a-priori 16y ago
  I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication. I haven't heard this one before, but it wouldn't surprise me. Children up to age 7 or so can't appreciate the fact that other people's experiences are any different from theirs (egocentrism). This is why kids will do things like bury their faces and say "you can't see me!". They don't understand that just because they can't see you, you can still see them. It's not a big stretch from there to them believing that if they hear their internal monologue, that other people hear it as well.
  - 16y ago

jamesbkel 16y ago

Great book if you're interested in further reading http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-About/dp/0743247132 http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-About/d...

terhechte 16y ago

This is very similar to what Socialogist George Herbert Mead proposed in his grand theory of "Social Behaviorism" (1934): "Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, or more specifically, social interaction. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themselves. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, and thus through language we become other to ourselves.[16] In joint activity, which Mead called 'social acts', humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions (e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing, hiding/seeking, talking/listening). In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead) He proposed that organisms first experience or see themselves as an object (or perceive themselves at all, thus stepping over the instinct-border) when they use their voice and hear their voice at the same time and see that others react to that voice too. Even though it is very theoretical it makes for good and interesting reading.

delackner 16y ago

Can anyone confirm this last (supremely fascinating) quote at the end of the article? " In sign languages such as BSL, you’d use your hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. to express things like that the walk was on a dirt road; it was nice out; and you enjoyed the walk, with it all expressed simultaneously. This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put into print, though attempts have been made. "

andrewce 16y ago
Confirmed. Adding such sensory detail to narrative descriptions is pretty easy to do in American Sign Language (I can't speak for BSL or others, though French Sign Language is pretty close to ASL, from what I understand). I'm no longer good enough with ASL that I can do all that simultaneously (I'm a native speaker as a result of 8 years at a school for the deaf, but use spoken/written English all but one or two days out of the year).
kbutler 16y ago
The failure of print to convey the richness of language is not unique to sign - we're just used to the limitations. Consider the difficulty people have with expressing rich communication via email compared with vocal conversation, and again compared to face-to-face communication. It is fascinating that additional factual details can be conveyed in sign, but it is inaccurate to believe that print can encapsulate the richness of direct personal communication. kb

jamesbressi 16y ago

A must read--both the article AND discussion here. This article and the discussions below are truly one of the more fascinating topics to be had. It is always great to read amazing topics submitted to HN (which is a large portion of the point here, right?) and to read comments for better understanding and discussion (which is the other potion here), but to have both an intriguing article matched with equally thought-provoking and explorative discussion is a complete intellectual gem.

6ren 16y ago

There's a thought here that part of our fundamental intelligence is cultural, and without that language, our brains are seriously incomplete. What is even more amazing (and somewhat relieving in its robustness) is that human communities develop language spontaneously. There's the famous case of a school of deaf children in Nicarangua, who, lacking teachers, spontaneously developed their own language. Apparently, with complex grammar and so on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language I find this profoundly hopeful, in what it shows about people. Also 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... (via sp332's link) Even in this article, there is mentioned "homesign" or "kitchensign", though I imagine it is very limited, and would tend to lack abstractions, complex grammar and so on, being used by a small (ie family) group, for domestic purposes, and while the child is very young.

sarenji 16y ago

I'm so deaf I can't hear much of anything, even with hearing aids. I never learned American Sign Language. I lip-read terribly. I also have an inner voice. I read at a grade level above hearing peers. I understand puns. How did that happen? I learned Cued Speech[1]. It's not mentioned anywhere in this article. It's a system that, summed up in a few words, uses signs for phonemes. Because of this, I could learn English within English. And when I took Spanish classes, I learned Spanish within Spanish. I also dream in verbal words. Even after I learned ASL, I still dream verbally. The words are always quiet, a bit muffled -- this is how I heard things early in life, with hearing aids (I have a cochlear implant now). Occasionally I see captions, as if it's a TV show. A last note. In the article it mentions little d and big D deaf; the way I learned it is that little d deaf people are deaf people in general, and big D deaf is the Deaf culture and community. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech

esoteriq 16y ago

Long-time lurker here - this is one of the first articles that I've felt compelled to respond to. I have a unique perspective on deafness and language. I was born profoundly deaf (so deaf that audiologists proclaimed me as the deafest child ever - what an honor). I learned ASL when I was six months old. To preface - I was incredibly lucky to have parents who learned an entire new language for me (they were immigrants, so it was no easy task for them) and noticed my deafness early. I also got a cochlear implant, which enables me to hear speech fairly well. Over the years, I've learned how to speak and listen well enough to converse with most people. I've also managed to maintain my fluency in ASL - it's a very important part of who I am. According to my mother, I was able to express my desires (I want orange juice, my diapers need changing, etc.) as early as 8 months. So, I was able to talk to my parents at a different level than hearing infants of the same age. I have plenty of deaf friends who were not as lucky. Some of them had hearing losses that were not discovered until they were more than two years old. Some of them just had parents who didn't want to or could not learn ASL. Their performance, academic and otherwise, has lagged behind their hearing peers. I find that their thoughts are not as organized as someone who learned language early on (regardless of form), so some of their actions don't have "common sense." Frankly, the benign neglect I see with deaf children is shocking and quite depressing. It makes me grateful for what I had growing up. This article also made me think about how different my thought process is from hearing people's processes. Even after years of using speech as my main mode of communication, ASL still influences my thoughts quite heavily. For example, I tend to think about spatial matters in ASL - i.e. how a street is laid out. Also, I tend to think about emotions in ASL, complete with facial expressions. On the other hand, with more technical issues such as the law (I'm a lawyer), I'll think in words, even spoken words sometimes. In all and all, I'm grateful that I was able to learn ASL so early and transition to spoken language. ASL really enriched my life - culturally and mentally - and I'm very glad that ASL was my first language.

cloudwalking 16y ago
Can you tell us more about the cochlear implant? I've never met someone who has one (that I know of).
- 16y ago

beefman 16y ago

>This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put into print, though attempts have been made. I sense opportunity...

IsaacSchlueter 16y ago

Good article. One correction, however: One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages, such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions outside of hand and finger gestures. ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a mouth morpheme and a hand gesture. If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.

seiji 16y ago
I agree. Saying ASL only uses hand gestures is like saying speaking only uses vibrations of molecules in the air. The world would speak like those strange text-to-speech animated bear videos. ASL + Expression: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OL33OEW6QA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OL33OEW6QA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKnQjBf8wM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKnQjBf8wM
esoteriq 16y ago
Yeah, that comment didn't really make sense to me either. I'm fluent in ASL, and I have a working knowledge of BSL. What I can tell is that ASL is more conceptual than BSL. BSL tends to track the English language more closely. For example, ASL will have one sign that expresses an entire sentence, but BSL will most likely have individual signs reflecting the individual words in the sentence. (This is not always true, of course.) All of sign languages depend primarily on gestures and facial expressions.

TravisLS 16y ago

There was an excellent episode of Radiolab about this subject. If you have the time or inclination to listen to an hour long podcast, I highly recommend "Words": http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/ http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/

pnathan 16y ago

This is fascinating. Of particular note to me is the conception that sign language operates in parallel, rather than in sequential. Written language is sequential. In the computer domain, parallelism is, in my experience, best expressed in circuit diagrams and sequence diagrams. This is in the picto-ideagraphical realm, which is the realm of sign languages. Of course visual programming languages have a long and distinguished history of living in a niche. But I wonder if there is a radically awesome visual programming language expression out there that is sufficient.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Similar discussion from eight months ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 Extremely interesting subject, extremely interesting discussion, with many great insights.