
In what language do deaf people think? - niyazpk
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2486/in-what-language-do-deaf-people-think
======
DanielBMarkham
My aunt was a deaf-mute (That's what she called herself. I have no idea if the
term is pejorative) Her husband, my uncle, was blind. So she would sign things
that he couldn't see, and he would yell at her and she couldn't hear them.

Made for a great marriage.

(Joking aside, it was really interesting to watch them communicate. He would
hold her hands while she "spoke" Then she would hold his hands -- so he knew
she was there -- while he spoke back to her. Worked very well, actually. They
had two beautiful kids that grew up to become advocates and workers in the
hearing and sight-impaired communities)

It was an amazing family. As I recall, both had jobs outside the home. Both
were avid readers, writers, and participated in several civic organizations. I
used to love visiting them as a kid.

~~~
shasta
I think I saw a documentary about your aunt and uncle, with Richard Pryor and
Gene Wilder.

~~~
shasta
Wow, it says -4, but I seem to have lost over 30 karma on this comment. Is -4
just the display cap?

~~~
Groxx
I think it is. I've down-voted a couple -4s, but on refresh it still shows -4.

~~~
Groxx
additional thought, after ability to edit had passed:

I wonder if it's to intentionally deflate scores which drop to -4. For
particularly bad ones, it'd _encourage_ moderators to downvote.

Not that I particularly think yours is. Must've rubbed a few the wrong way.

~~~
shasta
I'm surprised that ~45 and counting people would downvote this. I assume these
are people who saw "See no evil, hear no evil" and are taking it out on me.

~~~
scott_s
Or, they felt you turned an honest, personal, on-topic comment into a bad
joke.

------
10ren
Communities evolve language spontaneously. Evidence of this is a school of
deaf children (in Brazil IIRC) who were not taught sign language (due to lack
of a teacher, due to budget). They developed their own, which became quite
complex and of comparable sophistication to other human languages.

Taken with the conclusion of the submission that abstract thought requires
language for its development, this leads us to the conclusion that abstract
thought - far from an isolated activity - is a consequence of community.

It seems to me that it would be possible to develop abstract thought in
isolation, but perhaps it would take a genius, in the same way that some
mathematicians have developed mathematics in isolation, and it's just that it
helps tremendously to have the cultural foundation to stand on. eg. I find it
much easier to visualize abstraction, reference and so on, than to say it.

~~~
drinian
The school was in Nicaragua, and it's been of great use to researchers:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/2...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/22/new-
nicaraguan-sign-language-shows-how-language-affects-thought/)

------
hagananaga
>He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands
moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign.

It sounds to me like she was thinking out loud, or 'talking' to herself.
Thinking would correspond to _imagining_ her hands moving, presumably in far
more detail then the rest of us can render internally. Except perhaps for some
master craftspeople who use their hands professionally.

For example, a few pianists can learn a piece from reading the score alone,
away from the keyboard.

------
est
> Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language?
> Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to.

Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it's
very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was
a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes
depicted in movies and sitcoms?

As a Chinese, now I can think in languages (dual thinking in Mandarin and
English), but in the school days I have developed a totally different,
alternative way of thinking process.

All Indo-European languages have alphabet to represent syllables, but _Chinese
is not a language_ (Mandarin, Cantonese are languages), it's a distinctively
unique writing system. Why unique? Its logograms/logographs are not directly
linked with phonemes but linked with the _meaning_ itself.

When I do thinking and reasoning, I recall a concept by the word's exact
character shape and structure, then match with the picture of book pages I
memorized, identify the corresponding semantics and then organize my result.
This is _way_ faster than thinking in languages like a background voice
speaking in my head.

Elementary education in China has a technique called 默读, which means read
without speaking, after we learned this, later we were taught to get rid of
"read" altogether. We only scan the picture of one book page, and cache it as
a static picture, then a question is raised about a particular word appeared
in that page. We are demanded to recite the context out. This is called
memorize-before-comprehend. After decades of training and harsh tests like
this, we were totally used to treat thinking as pattern extracting from lines
of sentences.

This is why Chinese find English grammar funny, a noun is a noun, it should be
a static notation of things, easily recognizable universally, why the hell do
people invent stuff like plural form to make obstacles for _recognizing_?

Human voices spectrum are way smaller than visual spectrum. And our brain is
faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially
pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?

Update 1: Anther reason why Chinese are soooooo obsessed with calligraphy. If
some idea is really important we write it in an unforgettable, various artful
way so the pattern extracting is even faster. And the calligraphy details
contains rich hints and link to related ideas.

Update 2: Found out deaf people also have problems with English grammar,
similar to the common mistakes Chinese makes
<http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgasc/_/c0mmn2l>

~~~
epochwolf
I think in written english. For me written english and spoken english are
separate languages. I have extreme difficulty translating english words into
their spoken equivalents. The reverse is easier only because I have far more
practice with it. I have to memorize the spoken words that associate with the
sounds. (Part of this may be because written english has a dozen possible
sounds for each letter combination)

This is horrible obvious when I try to work with numbers. I've never worked
with math higher than two digits in spoken language. In order for me to do any
more complex math I first need to translate the spoken numbers into written
form. Translating between written and spoken forms is painful for me. It can
take me two or three seconds _per character_ to comprehend spelling, phone
numbers, or math. Writing down a phone number is almost impossible unless one
of the parts is one I have memorize. 414, 920, and 644 are numbers I can
instantly convert between their written or spoken forms because they are parts
of numbers I've memorized. It is frustrating for me because no one I've
encountered seems to have this issue and therefore I'm a special kind of moron
for not being able to keep up.

The only reason this hasn't caused me horrible problems in life is I'm able to
memorize enough to compensate.

> And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual
> stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?

I'm pretty sure I think at one level of abstract above imagery most of the
time. I'm currently reading through Lord of the Rings and I'm finding myself
not thinking in imagery at all but simply absorbing information and forming
mental maps of the terrain instead of experiencing it visually. Some of it is
definitely Tolken's writing style, it readily lends itself to abstraction in
my mind.

When reading Lord of the Rings, I force myself to experience it at a lower
level of abstraction. At a lower abstraction my brain has to work much harder
to form original imagery (not just dropping in stuff from the movies) and my
reading drops to a fifth of my normal speed. The experience is much richer and
well worth it.

~~~
todayiamme
I have an analogous problem. I cannot spell words which are spelled
differently than the way they are pronounced like resteraunt and other stuff
like that. I also have weird quirks with numbers and somehow calculation takes
me a long time and I tend to make idiotic mistakes unless I am 100% in the
moment (we all do, but these mistakes are different from what other people
make. It's the same pattern over and over again).

I think that you might have some degree of dyslexia and other co-morbidities.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Comorbidities>).

Have you ever gotten it checked? An accurate diagnosis can go a long way in
formulating a response and finding a solution to this.

I can't even begin to imagine how bad it must be for you, but I do know that
if you work at it with some professional help then it will improve in subtle
ways. Miracles won't happen due to age, but you will be the richer for it.

Take care.

~~~
epochwolf
> I think that you might have some degree of dyslexia and other co-
> morbidities.

I don't know if I was clear enough. I only have difficultly converting between
spoken and written language. My reading and math skills are fine. I can keep a
running total of groceries in my head during a trip to the store.

I do have trouble remembering proper spelling but that's what spell checking
for. (OSX 10.6 added automatic spelling correction to TextEdit. I love it!)

------
Jun8
Straight Dope's answers are often quite illuminating but on this one they've
really dropped the ball. First, consider the statement "I think in English,
because that's what I speak." This is an extremely naive view of, what is to
linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, etc., a huge enigma, or
actually two:

1\. Is our thought process based on language, i.e. does it use syntactical
transformations that are characteristics of language. Note that introspective
evidence immediately reveals that at least part of our thinking are in images.
This type of thinking is clearly now linguistic. So, let's limit the question
to the other modes of thinking, e.g. reasoning.

2\. If the answer to (1) is affirmative, then in what language do we think? Is
it our native language? What if we have two native language? What happens for
deaf people? If we think in our native tongue, then how strong an influence
does it exert on our thought process (i.e. was Whorf right?)

AFAIK, (1) is now accepted by most philosophy of language people. (2),
however, is a matter of some debate. Some people, like Fodor, claim that we
think in an innate language. This position is hard to defend for various
reasons. With the recent rise of linguistic relativism (suppressed for about
thirty years by Chomsky and his followers) more and more researchers are
delving into the question of language of thought and the effect it has on our
cognitive processes.

For an excellent introductory survey on the philosophical issues, see Murat
Aydede's article (<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/>). If
your cup of tea is more along the lines of cognitive psychology/linguistics,
check out Lera Broditsky's work
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky>)

~~~
ph0rque
My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at
which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student
when I was 17.

I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I
learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement'
them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.

~~~
Jun8
Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)

~~~
axod
Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as
images/video sequences.

~~~
Jun8
At least some _has_ to be in a linguistic representation (check the Aydede
article I linked above, it's interesting). Why? Because (i) You cannot
represent everything using images, e.g. "brother", "justice", "tesseract", but
more importantly (ii) it is impossible for image representations to support
complex syntactic manipulations necessary for reasoning. As a very simple
example, think about the syllogism that starts with "all men are mortal". How
would you convert the deduction to a representation based on images.

One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical
functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented
using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been
devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and
Chinese characters had this characteristic).

~~~
villa1n23
This answer seems to be Begging the Question.

You can represent brother and justice, via imagery, but what you would be
doing is using a token example, comparing and creating a type out of the two
situations. Now communicating that idea without a linguistic representation
would be near impossible(I can't imagine an easy way) but to apprehend it
without a linguistic layer is possible. (ii) It could just be my own
misunderstanding of what is being said, but does having a visual
representation system, mean that symbols cannot be manipulated to interact, or
does that by definition make them a language? Is this a functional definition
we are working with?

As well, with words like "every" "the" "a" it sounds like these things are
objects to you, and not emergent connectors inherent in a linguistic system,
they exist by virtue of the language existing. A visual system may not have
need for such conventions. Many of these questions or examples assume an
almost external objective (at least thats my interpretation) existence of
linguistics, but this is coming from a linguistic mind, and assumes the
necessary existence of it.( hence my begging question comment at the
beggining).

I held much the same view, until I experienced ineffable idea's and concepts
in non linguistic form. Anecdotally, one can try salvia or dimethyltryptamine
and gain the qualia experience of a thinking or experience without
linguistics.

Good points, but I feel Impossible is too strong a conclusion based on whats
been said. :)

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kripssmart
As a child I started thinking on images and pictures than on words and I had
the impression for a long while that everyone does the same. Though I never
had any issue with my thinking or hearing or talking, I comparatively had slow
speed at putting those thoughts into words. Or in otherwords, my thinking
speed exceeded my talking speed. 2 points to mention - 1. Either that speed
difference is the reason why my brain developed a different interface for
thinking in terms of images and pictures than on words. 2. Or maybe because my
brain used images first hand and that’s why my talking speed became slow
(since visual network is comparatively faster than words). [A brain scan
should tell you the difference]

Either way, I just said this to explain that our brain just needs a medium to
think or if explained in terms of semantics - a medium to develop the semantic
net. The voice that you have in your head is not something with which you are
born. It’s something that’s being developed. It’s the same that happens with
anyone with a hearing/speaking impairment that the brain will develop a
different interface for them to think. For example, most people with autism
probably will have a different thinking medium. Not sure if I can say it this
way - but I felt that the brain uses ‘its own language’ to develop its
thinking ability based on how you are.

------
city41
Do people generally think in their spoken language? I mean sure I think in
English, but not all the time. If I'm doing some serious, deep thinking, my
thoughts tend to escape words and just become thoughts (hard to explain). I
always assumed that's how everyone thinks.

------
pfedor
To the people who claim that thinking happens in some language or other: how
about what's going through your head when you play chess? Is that not thinking
by your definition? Or do you really narrate it to yourself, as if you were
writing a commentary of the game?

------
pbhjpbhj
I've mentioned this here before but when formally learning German language for
the first time I'd often recall BSL signs (or French words equally) instead of
the correct _Deutsch_ word. This indicates to me that the same internal token
was indexing all my foreign language words including the signs.

Occasionally I'll think with a sign just as occasionally I'll drop in a
foreign language word into internal speech.

My youngest at 16mo is getting quite a few signs now (and has a couple of
recognisable utterances - "dake" (his bro's name in modified form), "what-
this", "cheers"(!)). He's pre-vocal but he can express quite a few things and
he can attempt to manipulate us using mock cries. This last point to me means
he's thinking about what he wants to acquire (chocolate, ice-cream, whatever
someone else is eating!). He also makes responses to signals that he's going
to defecate and asks for his potty (sometimes, he's just managing to do this
now) - again this seems to be relatively complex thought.

It would be interesting to me to see if his brain pattern indicates, to those
doing the research, a pattern similar to a sign language user or not?

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saint-loup
"Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized
differently from that of a hearing person."

That's trivial. It just means "the mind is a structure inplemented in the
brain, so any change in the mind translates into some change in the brain".

~~~
rictic
It's remarkable if we can observe these differences directly given our
currently rather course scanning mechanisms. That may or may not be what the
author was saying though.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Not to nit-pick, intended to help: I think you mean "coarse" rather than
"course". After the item here a day or two ago about Garden Path sentences,
your comment took me several re-takes to parse correctly.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
See, that in itself is interesting to me - that you found it hard to parse
that sentence because of a misspelling.

To me it seemed easy to understand: I think the internal process is that as I
read I'm speaking internally to myself and so hear¹ the phonic reproduction,
homophones don't matter then, the meaning is clear as in that context "rather
course" the path/progression/learning-period meaning of course is nonsensical.
Also there's probably something in the couplet "rather coarse" being common
and there being few words that can follow rather.

I'm pretty good at proof reading but making many homophone (homophonic?)
errors in informal writing.

\--- ¹ I wrote this as "here", lol.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Curious.

I don't read "out loud, but silently" (if you see what I mean). I don't hear
the words in my head as I read. I trained myself at age 8 or 9 to read very,
very fast by not "sounding out" things in my head. Net result is that I get
confused quickly by misspellings. Then I need to backtrack and read things
"out loud" while trying not to see what's there.

Which is tricky.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's not sounding out as if I read aloud it's definitely much faster but it's
also a phonic process to some extent. Scanning is less phonic in that no
single words get sounded but somewhere there is a subconscious process still
make phonic analysis I think - I can scan your comment for example and tell
someone it's meaning but not the words you used.

Were you an early reader? I read at age 11 when I was 6 (although formal
reading ages weren't assigned then).

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I don't really know how old I was when I learned to read - certainly I was
reading by age 4, and probably reading at a standard of age 10 when I entered
school at age 5.

But that's a guess.

And it seems to me that I have two modes of reading: fast and "normal." In
both I have trouble with misspellings that create alternate or near alternate
parses, and yet in "normal" I do "hear the voices in my head."

So it's not just that.

At this point I'm reminded of the tennis player who was losing a match, and
during the change-over he said admiringly to his oppenent: "Your serve is the
most fluid, flowing and graceful serve I've ever seen." "Thank you" replied
his opponent. At the next change of ends he asked: "On the ball toss, do you
breathe in or out?" His opponent didn't reply, but did lose his next 6 service
games as he wondered.

I probably won't think too much more about exactly what happens when I read.
Besides, I've heard that double-blind experiments in psychology and
linguistics often produce results contrary to those produced by introspection.

I think I'll stick to math and hacking.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Lol, thanks for your thoughts.

------
lolsmiff
When we are first born, we experience a barrage of new sensations. Our minds
automatically integrate this sensory information as perceptual information of
the world around us. As we grow older, we begin to form our first abstract
concepts of the world in terms of visual images.

Humans cannot communicate in concepts, however, and we need a perceptual
language (optimally one that we can both see and hear) to do so. Not only does
this enable us to communicate ideas and concepts to others, but it also serves
as a kind of storage system for the mind, making learning and the formation of
complex thoughts much easier.

It is generally easier to think in terms of language than abstracts, because
language is simply the concrete form of conceptual information.

Because deaf people can only visually, not audibly, perceive their language,
they are obviously set back in terms of their ability to learn and think
audibly. However, because they can still use sign language and understand
written language, I would not expect their learning or thinking ability to be
lessened by any significant degree.

------
hunterclarke
Wow that is mind-blowing. I could not possibly imagine a world without words,
especially the ones in my head. It goes against every intuition I have to
believe in thought that lacks language.

~~~
Niten
For my part I know that I don't strictly think in words, or pictures, or any
other such representations. I'm sharply aware of this because I'm relatively
slow putting thoughts into words; so when I have some thought, I can
consciously hold that thought in my head for a moment before the corresponding
words come to mind.

For instance, suppose I realize I'm out of milk. It'll come to mind that I
should go to a grocery this afternoon to buy more milk, but this intention
doesn't form as a complete sentence in my head. It may literally take a couple
seconds for me to recall the vocabulary I'll need to express this thought in
words, but I can continue thinking about my trip to the grocery -- which one I
should go to, what else I need to pick up there, etc. -- before any words have
even come to my mind. So ideas and their linguistic representations are very
distinct to me, and sometimes I don't even bother with the latter at all,
because (for whatever reason) forming the linguistic representation of a
though imposes a significant overhead on my brain. (I'm also dyslexic, for
what it's worth, and I often wonder of these issues are related.)

My hypothesis is that for people with better functioning language centers than
mine, words may come to mind so easily that the delay between thought and
linguistic representation is imperceptible to them, hence they "think in
words". But for people like me those words might come late or not at all, but
regardless, I do think all the same...

~~~
JBiserkov
Especially when I'm thinking fast thoughts - just assembling some concepts in
my mind to see if they fit - I switch to English(not my native language)
because it's words are shorter.

------
known
Why do you need language to think? Isn't brain enough?

------
lookACamel
So isn't that like thinking in text?

~~~
astrodust
Except without the inner voice reading it back to you with the proper sounds.

------
tkahn6
I've also often wondered if the language one thinks in has any effect on
cognition or the "efficiency" of thought (if that even makes sense).

~~~
wheels
That's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and has largely fallen out of favor
in modern (Chomskyan, universal grammar) linguistics.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

~~~
phuff
And modern, Chomskyan, universal grammar linguistics has fallen out of favor
among most post-modern linguists everywhere outside of Boston ;)

------
yannk
Lisp

