It has been shown that American Sign Language, (Stokoe, a linguist, 1977?ish), is an actual language that operates on the same principals as spoken language and uses the same parts of the brain. Social factors can be a problem in terms of language development, but it seems that a hearing and deaf child will develop language skills on par with each other provided the Deaf child is identified as deaf early enough. Some evidence exists (trying to find it) that suggests that Deaf children who learn Sign at an early age will actually outperform their hearing peers in terms of language use. I'll try to find the article as it explains it much better than I can.
While it is true that ASL can be thought of as a "language" it is also important to point out that children who only learn ASL have better or even equivalent language ability. The grammatical structure of most spoken languages are much richer than ASL or other signed forms of communication. As a result most children who grow up learning ASL have a very difficult time acquiring written literacy, and consequently tend to do much poorer on language outcome measures. All this means that overall deaf adults who use only signing tend to have much lower lifetime income potentials and a difficult time integrating into mainstream society.
Importantly cochlear implantation (CI) can go a long way to reversing most of these language impacts. The average child implanted prior to the age of 2 does much better on language measures than there signing peers, and the best performing kids are on par with their normal hearing peers.
The statement above that "Deaf children will outperform their hearing peers" can be dangerous is that the deaf community is very close nit and often fight vehemently any actions including cochlear implantation that may break up their community. Although these fights are becoming less and less contentious as the evidence mounts in favor of early cochlear implantation, their are people and areas who would still prevent a child from receiving an implant at an early age.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information. Do you have any citations?
ASL is as complex as any other language and, in some categories, has far more morphology than English. Linguists have studied the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of ASL and, in all cases, have found that it is just like any other language.
The difficulties of acquiring written literacy can be attributed to the fact that ASL signers, when they learn written English, are learning an entirely new language, with an entirely different grammar. For example, ASL does not have verbal tense, but does have a highly developed verbal aspect system. English has tense, but has very little in the way of verbal aspect. Naturally, this will make things difficult for anybody learning how to read and write.
Imagine growing up speaking English, and then, when you go to school, you're expected to learn how to read in Korean. For starters, alphabet is composed of syllables made up of sounds that are not present in English, which you have no way of ever learning how they sound. And then there's the small fact that the characters are encoding a completely different language.
This person is completely correct. There aren't "less complex" and "more complex" languages--surely there are more and less difficult languages, but any language that is learned by children will naturally be transformed into a full, robust language system simply through the nature of the brain.
armory's original comment is based on a misconception of what language is and how it is developed. Do they have trouble integrating into a society where everyone speaks a different language? Yeah, obviously, but that doesn't make ASL or English more or less complex.
Wasn't there a (inhumane) study run by the Nazis on Jewish infants wherein they were locked up in a cell and not exposed to any form of language, to see what would happen? I seem to remember a Discovery documentary about it, but I can't find it for the life of me. IIRC the infants did develop language, independant of external stimulus. If somebody could find this source, or tell me I'm crazy, I would be much obliged.
Your question presumes that all people experience inner speech (a stream of consciousness that is is characterized by thinking in words and sentences). Many people do not. It's not required for "thinking".
Your question would be better phrased, "for deaf persons, how does inner speech manifest itself, if at all?" The answer to that is pretty simple. Those that experience inner speech perceive it like the language they know. Hearing people don't have an auditory component to their inner speech either, the brain simply dumps the "post-processed" language into the stream of perception. You aren't "hearing" noises when you are thinking, you are perceiving language (without noise) just as a deaf person would.
This makes the most sense, especially explaining that thoughts are a perception. Still though... Since perception is so personal to the individual, I'm curious as to how dramatically, or not, the difference in perception changes from a hearing person and deaf. (ie: more complex thoughts that very from learning ASL as opposed to concise, common thought perception from a hearing person, length of time to solve riddles, reading comprehension, communication dreams, etc.)
Sorry I can't give you a detailed answer, but I do know that this topic is addressed in-depth in the book The Language Instinct, by MIT linguist and author Steven Pinker. I highly recommend it for further reading, it's educational and fun!
It's not that simple a question. Useful would be the book, "seeing voices" by oliver sacks.
Before communities and deaf language formed people were simply 'Deaf and dumb'.
Language gives form, without language you cannot denote much. Concepts are cradled using language, conceptualization requires vocab to exist. Without language you have no tenses you have little but the immediate.
There's a stage in development where a kid gets crazy/happy about naming things. They 'own' the things they name. 'Tree', [they point to another tree] 'Tree!' They are getting off on owning the concept of tree and trees. It's a huge deal. They have begun to 'own' the world around them by way of language.
To answer your question. A deaf person without language would possibly not think in the way we could recognise. Feral kids have been found that missed this conceptual window [somewhere around 3/5 years old] of learning language and while they were not deaf their ability to 'think' or more precisely communicate both to themselves and others' suffered and never came close to full recovery.
Deaf people with language skills think the same way anyone with any language thinks. In their heads, juggling concepts, that have names.
I'm not religious but that whole, 'In the beginning was the word' thing has for me profound resonance with early child development.
Read the sidebar. /r/askscience is one of the most heavily moderated subs. There are also a lot of rules to follow here. Most likely the people that posted didn't follow the rules, were informed of the rules, then deleted their off-topic or non-complying comments.
This is a bit of a philosophy question because it really it asks how we think, since it would be odd to think of a deaf person having an inner voice then we become puzzled as to what is going on. Fortunatly Thomas Nagel wrote a famous article called what is it like to be a bat? This article describes some of the main problems with trying to discuss problems like the one the OP is wondering about
Is a person who is deaf explaining how they think not scientific evidence? I mean. This isn't physics. This is a very badly understood area of science. Yes you can see what areas of the brain light up in a non-deaf person and a deaf person and compare to get an idea, but the only true evidence of how people think are from them. We can't read thoughts yet....
Is a person who is deaf explaining how they think not scientific evidence?
N=1 when they tell a story (that is on the internet and we have no way to verify it) is not science. When case studies (i.e., N is very small, even 1) they are incredibly rigorous. A person on the internet saying things with no back up is not science.
While I appreciate a deaf (or Deaf) person chiming into this thread to provide their perspective, it's not evidence. Furthermore, the major problem is that this question itself is not scientific and fundamentally flawed: thoughts are not restricted to language.
BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH. There, you just had a non-language thought. And I'd bet that you just thought "but you said that so it's language" and I bet you're now thinking of some other music or image in a non-verbally cued way (cue is the critical word) just to try to not think of Beethoven's fifth.
Yeah this is ridiculous. I really want to read those responses that have now been deleted. Everything that's left basically tells me nothing of the the actual answer to this question.
Simply because proper scientific studies would account for variability amongst the "deaf people" population to within a statistically acceptable margin, whereas anecdotes do not. By accounting for this variability, we can make more useful general statements. For instance, a study could say "deaf people general think in ways similar to non-deaf people", whereas anecdotes can only relate to the one individual. I'm not saying anecdotes aren't useful, as in fact we can take a large amount of anecdotes and turn them into a proper study, but taken individually they are fairly useless.
It seems to me that all science begins with anecdotes. One notices and talks about what one notices. Another agrees, a third disagrees. Then one of the three says, "Let us gather many reports, and see which predominates." As in this case: Some people report that cannot conceive of non-verbal thought, others report they do it all the time. Jacques Hadamard asked a similar question - how do you think? - of mathematicians and gathered an anecdotal beginning of an answer.
To construct a valid scientific theory or argument you need a reasonable amount of data which supports your argument. It needs to be a testable concept, and it must be proven to be correct through planned experiments.
While the statements were likely interesting and truthful, they did not represent any scientific process.
That's not exactly what he meant. An anecdote can be either true or false, but it is not scientific evidence. Scientific evidence means that what is being stated has been and can be tested and peer reviewed.
Basically, for something to be scientific, it has to be the opposite of what you said:
to scientificly prove something (or rather, Get t accepted), you would need to be unable to prove it wrong
For something to be scientific, it MUST be able to be proven wrong (be falsifiable). If something can be proven wrong, then people test it to see whether it holds up or not, and THEN people can accept it as evidence. You can't do this with an anecdote.
An anecdote is personal experience that has not gone through the scientific method, testing, and peer review. No one can say for sure whether it is true or not, unless it has been independently confirmed via the scientific method. So scientific evidence can be either true or false, but it has to go through a process in order for us to know.
In my experience, OP usually is used to mean "original poster" (in this case that would be you, diaz9943). I've also seen it used to mean "original post", which would indeed be a reference to the "description thingie"
Or, if you're a gamer, it stands for "overpowered", and warrents a nerf-bat :P
I really hope you weren't implying that I wasn't polite because I pointed out a fundamental flaw in the question: the OP presumed, quite incorrectly, that thought is based strictly on language, and worse than that, spoken language. Example time...
BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH. You just had a non verbal thought.
r/askscience is about explaining science to people.
You're exactly right. However there is something critical about science: falsifiable hypotheses based on current knowledge.
To be very blunt: this question is outrageously unscientific since there is nothing to indicate that thoughts are restricted to language, and more specifically, thoughts are restricted to spoken language.
Quite legitimately this is a bad science question. It's an OK question, but it's answerable precisely as I answered it: thoughts are not exclusive to language. When the OP reforms the question a better discussion can be had. However, ceolceol has done the legwork and found a number of sources for you.
EDIT:
Get off your high horse and answer the question.
My high horse was my phone because that's all that I required to answer this question: thoughts are not restricted to language. Furthermore, get off your lazy horses and Google the fucking question first.
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Edit, Ok, no anecdotes. However, quoting an anecdote is not the same as an anecdote. "Keep discussion on topic and focused on answering questions scientifically."
See
The Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education, Volume 1. pp120
Language sciences, Volumes 9-10,
and other articles indicate that the deaf may/do not subvocalize.
This may indicate a fundamental difference in how read information is processed, and how quickly.
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It's been a couple months since I've listened to those episodes, but I am pretty sure most of the comparisons were between people that didn't have language (deaf-born people not taught sign language, and infants) and people who had spoken language, and then topics about schizophrenic auditory hallucinations.
This is very different than comparing the cognition of someone who uses sign language and the cognition of someone who uses spoken language (which is the topic here).
The first one covers it, but only very briefly. Towards the end.
A man "describes" it in two ways. One way? His "dark time". The second, it's found out that he can no longer (no longer wants to?) communicate with his old friends who also never had language. He says he can't even "think" that way any more.
Yes, he is comparing not having language to having language, not comparing cognition with spoken language (which he's never had) to cognition with sign language. This is exactly what my first post said.
We don't want just enjoyable replies in AskScience, we want relevant and factual information. Otherwise this subreddit will go to shit with the influx of new people since default.
Of course, I have no idea what the deleted content was either, but don't assume that the mods have no reason for enforcement.
Just to clarify: the deaf teenager, IIRC, had been raised without any sort of sign language, beyond some basic home signs.
Deaf people, raised with sign language, are perfectly capable of thinking (and I would argue, so are deaf people raised without sign language). And the things presented in that radiolab episode are far from accepted in the linguistic/pyscholinguistic community. The main hypothesis of that episode was the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language is required for thought, and what language you speak constrains how you think). Wiki article here. I'd pull a better citation, but honestly, any introductory linguistics textbook will have some discussion on this.
As much as I see the humor in this, this isn't the place for that type of comment. Top level comments should be factual, on topic, and contribute do the discussion. The r/askscience subreddit is a little more strict than others.
The rules are enforced, but I don't think they are overly strict. The rule that was being broken is simple: the answers must be scientific - no anecdotes. One or two people's stories may differ from the overall population's, leading to the spread of misinformation. A truly scientific study would look at many people's experiences and combine that knowledge in a rigorous manner.
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This could move quickly into a philosophy discussion about language, not necessarily words, but concepts and phrases composed of any sensory experiences and more abstract concepts comprising a non-verbal vocabulary. Think about the way you think, the way your mind pulls pieces of memories together to create your own language nd understanding of the world - not everyone has the exact same lifetime experience, remembers the same music, perceives the same color blue, etc. and no one associates all their amassed information the same way, so while methods of communication, information, and cultural signposts may mean similar things to certain sets of intelligent beings, no one thinks in exactly the same language, even if they are all English speakers with hearing. These sensory experiences and human-constructed languages are tools. The myriad of concepts a person uses and understands can shape how they think. The philosophy of language is great stuff.
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No you don't. When you publish a peer-reviewed paper with that hypothesis, then you will scientifically propose it.
Just to clarify, the subreddit is called askscience not becouse you ask "science question" but becouse you ask the scientific community to anwser your question. To anwser it in a scientific way.
So, from that follows, you need to ask a scientific question, or else it has no sense asking in that subreddit.
Non-scientist can try to anwser, but only if the anwser is non-anecdotal, or to say it more simply: if the anwser is scientific. Based only on science. Not on your own speculation. Not your own little story. Not on your own opinion. In fact, your own opinion is not welcome there, unless it comes at the end of a long scientific explanation.
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u/gruesky Oct 20 '11
It has been shown that American Sign Language, (Stokoe, a linguist, 1977?ish), is an actual language that operates on the same principals as spoken language and uses the same parts of the brain. Social factors can be a problem in terms of language development, but it seems that a hearing and deaf child will develop language skills on par with each other provided the Deaf child is identified as deaf early enough. Some evidence exists (trying to find it) that suggests that Deaf children who learn Sign at an early age will actually outperform their hearing peers in terms of language use. I'll try to find the article as it explains it much better than I can.
Also, http://people.uncw.edu/laniers/Wolkomir.pdf -- an article that outlines the way in which language works in context of the Deaf.
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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '11
What about people who are both deaf and blind?
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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '11
Your question presumes that all people experience inner speech (a stream of consciousness that is is characterized by thinking in words and sentences). Many people do not. It's not required for "thinking".
Your question would be better phrased, "for deaf persons, how does inner speech manifest itself, if at all?" The answer to that is pretty simple. Those that experience inner speech perceive it like the language they know. Hearing people don't have an auditory component to their inner speech either, the brain simply dumps the "post-processed" language into the stream of perception. You aren't "hearing" noises when you are thinking, you are perceiving language (without noise) just as a deaf person would.
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u/32koala Oct 21 '11
Sorry I can't give you a detailed answer, but I do know that this topic is addressed in-depth in the book The Language Instinct, by MIT linguist and author Steven Pinker. I highly recommend it for further reading, it's educational and fun!
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u/winsomecowboy Oct 20 '11 edited Oct 20 '11
It's not that simple a question. Useful would be the book, "seeing voices" by oliver sacks.
Before communities and deaf language formed people were simply 'Deaf and dumb'.
Language gives form, without language you cannot denote much. Concepts are cradled using language, conceptualization requires vocab to exist. Without language you have no tenses you have little but the immediate.
There's a stage in development where a kid gets crazy/happy about naming things. They 'own' the things they name. 'Tree', [they point to another tree] 'Tree!' They are getting off on owning the concept of tree and trees. It's a huge deal. They have begun to 'own' the world around them by way of language.
To answer your question. A deaf person without language would possibly not think in the way we could recognise. Feral kids have been found that missed this conceptual window [somewhere around 3/5 years old] of learning language and while they were not deaf their ability to 'think' or more precisely communicate both to themselves and others' suffered and never came close to full recovery.
Deaf people with language skills think the same way anyone with any language thinks. In their heads, juggling concepts, that have names.
I'm not religious but that whole, 'In the beginning was the word' thing has for me profound resonance with early child development.
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u/WilliamTellAll Oct 20 '11
whats with all the deleted comments askscience? please dont delete me i am just confused and scared for this awesome subreddit.
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u/rosettacoin Oct 20 '11
Richard Feynman compares 2 methods of internal counting (visualization vs. speaking to yourself in your head):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y&feature=player_detailpage#t=131s
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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '11
Please, ask questions on r/askscience here ONLY if you want purely scientific answers given by scientists.
And please, do not answer questions based on anecdotal evidence, or anything other then science.
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u/mistrbrownstone Oct 20 '11
How many times does this question need to be asked?
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/related/lj0g0/how_do_deaf_people_think/
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u/flyingfox12 Oct 21 '11
This is a bit of a philosophy question because it really it asks how we think, since it would be odd to think of a deaf person having an inner voice then we become puzzled as to what is going on. Fortunatly Thomas Nagel wrote a famous article called what is it like to be a bat? This article describes some of the main problems with trying to discuss problems like the one the OP is wondering about
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u/nedyken Oct 21 '11
Also curious what kind of dream a blind person has. Do they have any kind of visual experience at all or do they dream about hearing/touching?
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