Concerning my recent post on Thinking Without Words, a reader writes:
What about people who are deaf from birth? How do they think? Do they make up their own words? Or do they think without words, in a form of mentalese?
Good question!
This is something I was thinking about a while back (actually, about twenty years ago), so I asked one of my cousins, who was born deaf.
He responded that he sees people signing in his head reflecting his internal monologue.
Deaf folks have the same translation reflex that we do, they just translate their mentalese into a gestural language (typically ASL or American Sign Language here in America) rather than into a spoken language (like English).
In a related question that occurred to me, I wondered what people blind from birth associate with colors. It occurred to me that they would likely associate colors with tactile sensations–their minds filling in something they are familiar with (tactile sensations) for something they aren’t familiar with (colors).
So I asked a blind friend and he told me that it was indeed true: He associated the color red with the tactile sensation of heat, the color green with the tactile sensation of handling a dollar bill, and the color yellow with the feeling of touching a little yellow wooden bench he sat on when he was a small child. He hadn’t ever seen these colors, but he formed the tactile substitute impressions for the colors based on what others told him about things having these colors (i.e., things that are “red hot,” “greenbacks,” and in his own case, a yellow child’s bench).
Amazing how the human mind works, isn’t it!
Jimmy, I’ve sometimes wondered if the deaf sign language is universal, at least partly. IOW, does a deaf Frenchman and a deaf American share a common sign language? (same gesture for ‘love’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘bread’, etc.) Does your cousin know?
Actually, there is a bit of similarity between American and French sign language because ASL is based on French sign language (rather than British sign language). But fundamentally, sign languages are different languages from each other.
In fact, there are regional dialects and accents in sign langauge. Every town tends to have a few unique signs (e.g., the name of the town and other local towns) that mean one thing locally and either aren’t used or means something different elsewhere. This is in part because of the limited number of simple-to-make signs. You want common local words to be simple (e.g., so you don’t have to finger spell the name of the town every time you want to mention it) and so every area ends up with a few signs that have unique local usages.
Jimmy, your post reminded me of the time once when my son with epilepsy could not talk during a seizure, but he could sign (knowing ASL because his sister was deaf). Fascinating thing, the brain.
I remember reading a news article about a group of deaf kids in Nicaragua that developed a unique sign language independent of being taught.
But what about deaf people who don’t know sign language? I recently read an article that claimed a surprising number of deaf people don’t know sign language, or at least don’t know it very well, especially deaf children who grow up with parents who have normal hearing. So how do they think? Or what about deaf people in remote areas who never encounter sign language? They are obviously thinking somehow but what form do the thoughts take?
Re marion’s post: remember, 1) there are degrees of deafness, which in turn means differing levels of access to sound and speech, 2) many deaf people went deaf after oral language acquisition, and they don’t want or need sign language, and 3) many deaf children in hearing families do not acquire sign as quickly as deaf kids in deaf families. While it is never too late, of course, early language acquisition (whether oral or visual) is very important to all learning applications, and makes acquiring additional languages easier. Hearing people forget that English is as “foreign” to deaf Americans as Navaho is “foreign” to hearing Americans.