I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind, with no means to communicate with the world. I was also puzzled as to how Helen Keller managed to learn and write. The effort to learn with Tadoma must be herculean
I was also curious how Helen Keller managed to communicate. According to her Wikipedia page:
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as my soul's birthday. Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. But soon she began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures. "I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed," Keller remembered. "I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation.”
The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment: "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!". Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
I don't think that's quite the right frame, it makes non-verbal people seem like automatons. Language and cognition are closely linked, but people who are non-verbal for reasons other than damage to that part of their brain still have the physical and mental structures in concrete ways. Their "language" may be completely unique to their mind, but they can still think and reason and remember.
There was a girl who'd been kept in a room tied to a chair, and never spoken to / forbidden from making any sound, by her parents, since she was a toddler.
She had virtually no language when she was discovered at age 13. She eventually learned additional vocabulary referring to physical objects, but she never grasped grammar.
Yes, she had a lot of other psychological damage, but there appears to be critical periods in the acquisition of language. Keller's brilliance might never have been given voice if the attempt at teaching her language had occurred later.
Yes that's very insightful on some of the mechanics of language acquisition and the later impact on language fluency of missing that window.
It does not show that thinking or memory are absent before language acquisition or in people who never acquire it, which was implied by the comment I was responding to.
Keller's ability to communicate to others would certainly have been limited or absent if she hadn't had the opportunities in youth she had. But she still would have been able to form and recall memories, and engage with her own mind in some totally-opaque-to-us way.
Yes, I wasn't commenting on thinking and memory in non-verbal humans or non-human animals, for that matter; it seems obvious, to me, that these are present. I'm just not sure thinking in images and other sensations without words can be called language?
While writing this, I was reminded of some children (ages 6 to 23), I used to interact with at a job (many years ago), who could hear but were non-verbal and communicated with fingerboards. They would string images together to form "sentences", and overload images on their fingerboards to use as names for people around them (and these image names often made semantic sense, describing an attribute of the person being named e.g., the person who drove their school bus referred to by a picture of a bus). They did understand varying amounts of spoken English which makes it ambiguous if this is really support of language without words, though.
The concept of a language of images and other sensations without words as we know them is intriguing. Thanks for inspiring me take a few minutes to think about this more deeply.
I have a handful of vague memories of how I thought about the world before I could speak. It was very different from how I think today. I don't know how much of that difference is due to language versus physical development; I was probably around a year old at the time.
These memories are difficult to describe. For instance - my concept of "door" was sort of a combination of the idea of a flat, vertical plane that pivoted from the right side, the idea of grabbing something (like a knob or handle), the idea of pulling toward myself, and a kind of parallax motion where my perspective moved left and the door moved toward me and to the right.
Basically it was a partial mental image combined with an action. A noun and a verb. It wasn't a full image, though - I didn't picture a door, but rather was aware that the door existed. I didn't open the door in my mind's eye - I was too young to walk, so I'd obviously never opened a door myself - but awareness that a door was a thing that could be opened.
As an adult (I'm 38), I still have brief flashes of non-verbal concepts. I can sorta/kinda "feel" the door concept I described above somehow underlying the thought when I think of a door.
The closest parallel I can draw to this kind of cognition is how I understand logic systems today (programming, puzzles, etc.) I have a mental map. It's almost - but not quite - a flow chart. When I'm thinking about how things fit together, I'm moving those things around in my head and even changing their shape to see how they "fit against each other".
It all sounds weird when I write it out like this, actually. But it's the best way I can think of to describe it.
Is this way of thinking about things unique? Is it some variant of synesthesia that I've not heard of before?
> I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind
Here are some things I've learned that have changed my perception of things a bit:
1. The later in life disabilities come into play (especially around blindness and deafness), the harder it tends to be for people. It's not just the adjustment and learning new things - it's also the loss. But for people that are born with the same set of limitations, it's usually just the norm for them so less traumatic in general. This is an important distinction a lot of times because it can be easy to lump everyone into the idea that it's "desperate and depressing."
2. There are thriving communities and educational institutions where people can find others that are in the same boat. Us non-disabled folks tend to not know about them because they can fly under the radar, but they exist and people can find a lot of support in those circles. Sure, it's going to be limited given the population size and bumping up against the abled-focus world can be incredibly tough, but it isn't as grim as we tend to think from the outside.
What an incredible feeling of self-agency and power it must be to be able to say “I am not dumb” after being called a dumb mute by everybody all your life. Amazing.
The interview itself is dated and we've moved beyond a lot of the "doomsday" description of deafness and blindness (and deaf-blindness), but it's still interesting. And Walters herself credits the man as being one of the most inspiring and memorable interviewees she's ever had.
The most common these days is a "tactile" approach where one person uses sign language and the deaf-blind person holds their hands to "listen". There's research going on to make American Sign Language more streamlined to support this sort of interaction, but while that's doing on, in the US at least, it's common to have people just sign ASL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GrK3P15TYU
Blindness is a spectrum though so it's possible that some deaf-blind people will have some sort of ability to see (usually takes the form of tunnel vision). In that case, they can still communicate similar to deaf individuals but it's usually modified so that the hands remain much much closer to the face (stay within view of what they can see).
As the other commenter mentions, tactile signing is the most common. There can be differences between that and the normal sign language used in the country. When I've communicated with deafblind individuals using tactile signing, I have normally just used the normal sign language for Ireland (Irish Sign Language) while they held my hands. It's a highly personal (and can be emotional) form of communication.
I distinctly remember reading (but not where—it was real though, not fictional) about a tactile suit, which translates audio into vibrations on different body parts. Apparently deaf people successfully learned to use it to interpret speech.
I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind, with no means to communicate with the world. I was also puzzled as to how Helen Keller managed to learn and write. The effort to learn with Tadoma must be herculean