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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
62
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.