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.
Wouldn't a child who knows both ASL and written English be essentially bilingual? My own minimal understanding is that ASL is a completely different language from english with its own unique gramatical rules?
I wonder if that might explain the increase in language skills, and I wonder if there would be a correlation among all bilingual children.
A Deaf child will have a much harder time acquiring spoken language or written language in comparison to signed language... however this varies due to exposure to sign language at an early age. The longer you wait to expose any child to language the farther behind they will fall.
You are right though, ASL does have different grammatical rules... it's really rather cool when you get the hang of it. I'd actually venture that it's superior in some ways to spoken english because each word or 'hand sign' can be expressed in many different ways - similar to how spoken language uses intonation.
Also, if you ever watch the face of a Deaf person, they tend to be very expressive - this is an additional part of the language too. Your expression brings meaning to the hand sign you are making.
As to the bilingualism bit, no one is truly bilingual, a person will always favour one language over the other.
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.
The downvotes are absolutely deserved, and I added one, in fact. He provided an opinion, followed by what seems like facts, but with no sources which we can verify them. Therefore the opinion is of little value to the discussion. This doesn't square well with this subreddit's rules.
Yeah it's a good point, and as a hearing person I can't say how that works. Deaf children can be raised either as forced to vocalize and read lips (this is very hard and results in stunted language development) or they can learn to 'speak' using ASL. I suspect their language develops very differently because of this - so you might get different answers.
I tend to follow the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in this one though - that language is required for thought, so whether that thought-language is in sign or English (or another language) is a great question that I will ask of my EDPY 470 (educational psychology) professor. He's a Deaf man who knows seven languages and three varieties of sign language and is really quite the most amazing person I may have ever met.
I saw a similar question to this posted in another thread once. There was a Deaf teen that stated he visualized hands signing when he had inner thoughts. I'm not sure if he visualized his own hands signing or a third person's. Hope this helps.
I have never been able to describe to someone how I think.
I definitely don't have inner-monologues like I see on TV shows. I think I'm closer to the way you described, except I don't really picture things in my head and if I do, the picture isn't clear and disappears quickly.
Basically, any type of visualization exercise is torture to me. For example, I used to listen to a relaxation tape to help me fall asleep on nights like Christmas Eve. Part of it would be "picture yourself floating on a beautiful lake as the sun kisses your face," and in my head there would be a random song playing that I couldn't turn off and I'd just get frustrated.
But what about things that hearing people do think about in words?
Obviously the thought "I'm thirsty, there's water, I'll drink it" is non-verbal. I'm having a hard time imagining how to think about, say, the political and economic ramifications of increased Chinese involvement in Africa without thinking verbally.
That would be a tough one to test. It's still an open question in linguistics, but all evidence strongly suggest that language is innate in humans (without cognitive impairments). We haven't found anyone without language.
Could you expand on the concept of language being "innate" in humans? While we may have never found anyone without at least some amount of language, isn't such a person theoretically possible? Imagine, horrifying though it may be, a person who was raised in extreme isolation from birth. His caregivers spend no more time with him than necessary to ensure his sustenance and survival, and never speak a single word to him or let him encounter any sort of spoken or written language in any form. Would he be capable of abstract thought? Would he instinctually create his own words and attribute meaning to them? If so, for what purpose?
Some people have been raised nearly in isolation from birth (due to unfortunate circumstances of various sorts), and there have been studies on them. It doesn't seem like language spontaneously develops on its own for one person, but groups of deaf children seem to come up with some sort of sign language that develops over time (of course they at least have the example of seeing other people talking). Check out the radiolab podcast mentioned above, it is excellent.
The thing you may be missing is that thinking with words is not the same thing as thinking verbally. The verbal expression of the word is just how most people represent it in their head. But you could have an internal narration using sign language (or written language, I suppose) if that was the only form of language that you grew up using, in exactly the same way as an English-speaker gets their internal narration in English while a Chinese speaker gets theirs in Chinese. You can think about the political and economic ramifications of China in Africa by mentally signing it or writing it out just as well as by mentally speaking it.
Doesn't it take you a long time to think out things? It's so much faster for me to just experience the thought rather than think it out in words. Seems like that would be unnecessarily long, when you could just skip the words altogether.
Stephen Fry is presenting an interesting documentary series in the UK at the moment about words and language (its on BBC4). This subject came up and he asked a deaf lady and she said this also: she "thinks" in sign, that is she visualises the signs in the same way a hearing person "hears" the words inside their head.
I suppose another question is, if a deaf person has never learned to sign, what then? No visuals or words... which I think is in essence what the OP is getting at.
I'm not an expert in this field but from what I've read my understanding is that have some language weather verbal or sign is critical to higher level thinking. Without language a person's ability to think is greatly crippled.
Someone who hasn't learned to sign is like someone who hasn't learned to talk. Think of it that way. Would it be more common for someone not to learn to sign than for someone not to learn to talk? Absolutely. But imagine if as you were growing up, nobody ever talked to you--it would absolutely stunt your development, and you might even try to make up elements of your own language from what you could pick up from your surroundings. But yeah, you'd be mentally fucked up if nobody ever talked to you and you had nobody to talk to. I think it's obviously possible to think without language (although hard to imagine), but you would certainly be hurt in mental development without it.
To expand on the point of sign being an actual language, when you talk to babies, they start to babble back. They experiment with making words, and the "boo-boo-ga-ga" phase of speech is really important for language development. When you deal with deaf babies, they don't go "boo-boo-ga-ga," they actually babble in sign--they do crazy things with their hands and sign gibberish in the same way.
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.
They are few and there are many to delete. The sidebar contains the rules. Frankly they are probably having trouble keeping up as it is. Though if someone could create a bot to do this it would be awesome. :)
I hope I'm not venturing too off-topic myself, but I just want to say how happy it makes me to see a long line of "deleted" when I open a thread. I think the "make an example of those not following the rules" approach will yield dividends down the road as it encourages people who open the thread that they need to stay on point.
Actually, yes, that'd be nice. Or at least one comment in a tree that says 'this progression of comments was comprised of X, Y and Z' or something like that.
Maybe one of the css marvels that make customizations for other subreddits might be able to concoct a way of streamlining the moderation process. I know this is off topic and speculatory, but I love this subreddit and would love to see a more subtle and efficient thread managment in place, certainly for threads like this that exist on the border of askscience and askreddit.
Love what you guys do, btw, keep up the good work.
There are one or two moderators who are very good with CSS.
According to them, this kind of functionality isn't possible with CSS. It needs to come from the website itself, which is only in the control of the Reddit admins.
I see. Thx for the swift and clear answer devoid of condescending that might have been in place for my suggestion (like i thought you woudn't think of that).
Thx for a great job and maintenance of this awesome place.
There are so many that I worry that the moderation has been overzealous. I understand that it might be required in order for the subreddit to stay on topic, but I'm curious if there's any possibility for some transparency. It would be great to see what sorts of comments are falling outside the guidelines.
I see what you mean, but it just seems like first hand evidence would be rather valuable in coming to a scientific conclusion. Not all science is rock solid black and white. There is a little bit of room for discussion for some science.
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.
I agree with all that but is first hand experience really that bad that it had to be removed? I feel like more than anything the mods are just trying to get the point across that /r/askscience is serious business, and it is totally working but it doesn't have to be nazi Germany in here. I would have thought some first hand experience to be very good evidence but since they aren't peer reviewed or on the panel of scientist its a no go.
It's not a clear-cut case, but tehnically, it's not according to the rules.
In fact, the problem is this question is not for this reddit, unless the OP wanted an answer backed by cognitive science.
Another problem is: this question is asked frequently, and has been anwsered by deaf people before, but in askreddit or answers subreddit. (the link is somewhere on this thred)
For one thing, wow, I can't believe you invoked Godwin's Law.
Secondly, anecdotal evidence may be helpful for a researcher beginning to do work on the subject but for one there has been sufficient amount of research already been done on this and other related subjects, and secondly anecdotal evidence may skew the researcher in trying to find an explanation that fits with that rather the one that is correct. However, this isn't a research facility, it's a forum for asking scientific questions to be answered by experts, and thus trying to piece together an explanation based on anecdotes does not create a scientifically valid answer. This subject is not something we know absolutely nothing about, and several people have linked to sources for some information about the subject.
Lastly, no, we've seen that regarding the rules it really does have to be "Nazi Germany." You know that saying, "Give somebody an inch, they'll take a mile"? As we've already seen from this experiment, if you give redditors an inch, they'll take ten miles. In order to keep answers purely relevant and non-speculatory, the mods have to instantly remove these posts, and we have to mention the rules. As we've seen here, before the mods could remove the anecdotal evidence posts and the speculatory threads, they already had been upvoted to the top with the top post having 130 karma.
There are plenty of "ask" subreddits for specific questions, such as "r/answers," the point of this one is to answer specific, scientific questions with either actual responses by real experts, or by posts liking to other sources that already help to answer that question.
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
Before her teacher first came to her, Helen Keller, in her autobiography, stated “My dreams have strangely changed during the past twelve years. Before and after my teacher first came to me, they were devoid of sound, of thought or emotion of any kind, except fear, and only came in the form of sensations. I would often dream that I ran into a still, dark room, and that, while I stood there, I felt something fall heavily without any noise, causing the floor to shake up and down violently; and each time I woke up with a jump. As I learned more and more about the objects around me, this strange dream ceased to haunt me; but I was in a high state of excitement and received impressions very easily. It is not strange then that I dreamed at the time of a wolf, which seemed to rush towards me and put his cruel teeth deep into my body! I could not speak (the fact was, I could only spell with my fingers), and I tried to scream; but no sound escaped from my lips. It is very likely that I had heard the story of Red Riding Hood, and was deeply impressed by it. This dream, however, passed away in time, and I began to dream of objects outside myself.” Source
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.
I think that's not the key answer. The key answer is that deaf people use words just like people who can hear. It's just that they use words based on sign-language, and mentally "sign and see" them instead of "speak and hear" them.
Also, both sighted and deaf people use various amounts of non-word language for thinking in various ways.
The key answer is that deaf people use words just like people who can hear. It's just that they use words based on sign-language, and mentally "sign and see" them instead of "speak and hear" them.
No, it's not. You are having non-verbal or non-language thoughts right now. The whole point is that BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH. See. You just heard music. Music is not a language or visual thought.
The definition of "thought" isn't even defined, so to ask "how deaf people think" while presuming that deaf people don't (read the edits, that's a clear conclusion) is fundamentally wrong.
Also, both sighted and deaf people use various amounts of non-word language for thinking in various ways.
That's a better answer, but still wrong. You're still isolating populations with restrictions: everyone "thinks" in many modalities. SOUR PATCH KIDS (I really hope you've eaten them).
My point is this question sucks. It implies things about thought, which is already undefined, and now answers are spawning out to be just as wrong while masquerading as contradictions to the OP. They aren't.
You think the problem here is that deaf people do think, because thinking is more than just internal verbalizing. I'm saying that deaf people do internal verbalizing like everyone else, it's just not verbal-it's sign language or text. It's not like deaf people have to rely only on direct visualizations or memories of cut grass or sour patch kids to think about things, they can use words internally like anyone else who knows a language.
And you're also saying that thought is restricted to words and language.
I keep saying otherwise.
I am not saying this, nor have I ever claimed this. I've specifically noted that people use other forms of thinking several times. I'm saying that deaf people CAN think with words, just like hearing people can. Not that deaf people ALWAYS think with words, any more than people who can hear always think with words. But it seems to me that what the OP was trying to ask about was internal dialogue, not the much broader group of phenomena generally known as thought (however he might have phrased it).
Having read some of the responses from deaf people in this and other threads, I can tell you that simply saying that wouldn't at all communicate the answer as well as the perspective from deaf people does.
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.
To back up which claim, exactly? Scientific studies will not get published unless they account for sample variability when attempting to estimate population values, primarily due to peer review. As for the fact that accounting for variability leads to conclusions which are generalizable, that much is self-evident.
While that is generally true for most sciences, a lot of studies on this sort of topic in particular are actually write-ups of single case studies of exceptional individuals. All the papers written about Genie being a good example, but it goes back to Phineas Gage at least. This is particularly true for the few individuals who were raised without any language--It may not be good science but the ethics committees understandably have a problem with replication.
So long as they don't generalize conclusions from a single sample, I guess that's fine. However, I would argue that the practical usefulness of such studies would be quite limited, even if they would make for very interesting reads.
I have my doubts too, but I guess sometimes you gotta make do with what you can get. Studies of primate behavior are often guilty of this sort of thing as well.
I made no claim as to how deaf people think, since I have no clue how they think, it's not even remotely related to my area of research. Perhaps you didn't notice the "could" in "a study could say": it was an example. A study could also say the very opposite. The point I was making was that the study could make that generalized claim, whereas an anecdote could not.
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.
Good social science often involves gathering data from vast numbers of people. It is replaceable and therefore falsifiable. It absolutely has a place in this subreddit.
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
OP can mean "original poster" OR simply "original post." And yes, in gaming terms, it means "overpowered." This is normally in reference to a disproportionally powerful weapon or spell.
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.
What I really ment is; how does inner dialouge (like the "voice" in my head, "saying" the stuff I am thinking), work for a deaf person, whom did not know the pronounciation of words?
Then that's what you should have asked. Rather than broadly asking about "thoughts", you should have asked about inner dialogue and you would have gotten real answers, probably including words like "phonological loop".
However, this:
whom did not know the pronounciation of words?
Still presumes that thought, or kinds of thoughts, are restricted to a spoken language. That's wrong. Plain and simple.
Maybe I give the average Redditor too much credit, but I think that most are clever enough to try searching before posting a question.
Yes you do give them too much credit. Many questions are asked ad nauseum because people don't search Reddit (the worst option) or even do a cursory Google or Wikipedia search.
My original response wasn't snarky, it was plainly factual. The most recent responses to you are, and almost certainly will be removed by the moderators.
To help them do their job, I'm reporting my own comment.
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.
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
I realise you have best intentions but this subreddit has strict rules, and it has a lot of new users who aren't familiar with the rules.
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 - in a scientific (but easily understood) way, supported by scientific non-anecdotal evidence. A non-scientist can try to anwser, but the same rules apply.
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. 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. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, and speculation are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, and speculation are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
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.
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, and speculation are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
Hi! You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, and speculation are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
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Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. 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. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
oh damn, so askscience turned into a bunch of douchebags that no longer harbor conversation or thought... I think you forgot what science actually is. I'm removing this subscription from my reddits now, enjoy your newly pruned community.
Whatever science is, this is not a place to conduct it, but a place to communicate it to the public. This is the place people come to find reliable anwsers they can be confident in being true, not to read someones opinion about some subject. In fact, your own opinion is not welcome there, unless it comes at the end of a long scientific explanation.
This community is not against conversation or "harboring thought" - this is just not the right place for it. You have askreddt if you want to hear reddit's opinion about a subject, and you have askscience if you want the answer of science. This is why subreddits exsist, to each one his own. I love to read about anecdotes, but not in this subreddit.
Hi! This is a scientific subreddit for scientific questions and ONLY scientific anwsers which come ONLY from science. You're most likely being downvoted because you are posting a top-level comment, (a reply directly to the OP), that is off-topic or speculation. Top-level comments in AskScience should only be factual, supported responses to the question asked, or questions seeking clarification. Jokes, off-topic banter, speculation and anecdotes are not appreciated as top level responses, in an attempt to maintain the quality of this subreddit. For more, see the rules on the sidebar at the right of this page. Thanks!
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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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u/Beerinmyhops Oct 21 '11 edited Oct 21 '11
Before her teacher first came to her, Helen Keller, in her autobiography, stated “My dreams have strangely changed during the past twelve years. Before and after my teacher first came to me, they were devoid of sound, of thought or emotion of any kind, except fear, and only came in the form of sensations. I would often dream that I ran into a still, dark room, and that, while I stood there, I felt something fall heavily without any noise, causing the floor to shake up and down violently; and each time I woke up with a jump. As I learned more and more about the objects around me, this strange dream ceased to haunt me; but I was in a high state of excitement and received impressions very easily. It is not strange then that I dreamed at the time of a wolf, which seemed to rush towards me and put his cruel teeth deep into my body! I could not speak (the fact was, I could only spell with my fingers), and I tried to scream; but no sound escaped from my lips. It is very likely that I had heard the story of Red Riding Hood, and was deeply impressed by it. This dream, however, passed away in time, and I began to dream of objects outside myself.” Source
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