How can deaf people think?

visually?
you know, like, seeing the words, or pictures

They use a different language than you do, but it is a complete language, perhaps richer and more expressive than yours.

They think in sign.

@pdworkin ; so… I suppose scientists couldn’t research it.

@Harp , Very interesting. I suppose then that the thought is related to the tactile feel of the signs rather than their appearance. How else could Helen Keller have been able to think?

Deaf people can think in sign and visuals but I’ve always wondered how ferrell children thought because they don’t really have any sense of language.

I guess they visualize ? (=

Or maybe , they have their own unique way of thinking . May not be the same as the way we do it , but they’re definitely doing something with their minds .

Lose one sense , compensate with another . They might be better with their minds than we think .

One think I think is interesting about deaf people is that they have terrible grammar. I imagine they think in concrete objects more than we do with less focus on abstract semantics. It sometimes makes it difficult to communicate with them though

Brain scans confirm that they use the same areas in the brain for speech processing and speech production, see for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

Phonemes and morphemes are replaced by signs or lip movements, but more complex syntactic structures are basically handled the same way. For example

The boy gave her the book.

contains the verb ‘to give’ which has two objects. Our brains are hardwired for being filled up with grammar, i.e. kids before they actually learn their mother tongue are neurologically prepared for it. The same happens with deaf people. Semantic memory works the same way as well, because ultimately the stream of morphemes received by the ears (or the eyes in case of deaf people) have to be mapped onto abstract concepts. Take ‘tree’ as an example. On the surface it’s a four-letter word or a three-phoneme word or a x-signs word. But our brains store a lot more about it, like it got a root, there are branches and twigs, some have leaves and so forth. I would expect deaf people to have the very same semantic memory.

@jaketheripper I’ve taught deaf students in some of my writing classes and while their grammar is not consistent with ours (such as not using articles), it is consistent with their language. It is important not to make judgments.

I agree that deaf people have terrible grammar, but people that use txt spk do so as well. Funny thing about the brain, when one ‘road’ is blocked, another one is ‘opened.’ Non-verbal people can communicate rather easily, you just have to know what to look for.

If you ever get a chance to be around people with severe cognitive disabilities, take it, you will be surprised by how much the disabled can communicate and make their needs and wishes known. I’ve learned a lot from being around my wife’s ‘individuals’; that is, the people she is paid to care for, and they range from having very high functioning forms of mental retardation, to Down Syndrome, to people with severe disabilites, or as they are referred to, low functioning. They are people, just like the rest of the so-called normals, and some of them will amaze you with their intelligence and cunning.

@troubleinharlem I have no idea what you mean. What would keep a scientist from learning AMASLAN?

@jaketheripper, d’ya mean feral? I think there’s been too few of those sort of children to do any qualitative studies.

I would imagine deaf people thought in images or feelings or sensations.

I wonder how that works, thinking in sign. Huh! People are amazing.

Really? We evolved to create language, surely we were capable of thought before that.

@janbb great answer

I feel smarter just reading all this. ^^

My wife is deaf (she doesn’t use sign language), and she says her thinking is visual only.

@filmfann – I guess you would know! Thanks. ^^

@higherground – hmm. I never thought of it that way.

@tinyfaery – Complex human thoughts need language. This includes deaf people. Without sign language they can’t become normal human beings. Just thinking is not enough.

From Wikipedia: A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language (...). They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. The impaired ability to learn language after having been isolated for so many years is often attributed to the existence of a critical period for language learning, and taken as evidence in favor of the Critical Period Hypothesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_children

Hey way to go, mods!

http://www.fluther.com/disc/60265/how-can-deaf-people-think/#quip885100

If anyone cares to know, I felt this question was an insult to deaf people, who have problems hearing, but don’t really have any problems thinking, now, do they?

It is certainly a naive question, but I don’t think it was intended as an insult.

@IchtheosaurusRex I appreciated your response. I agree it wasn’t intended to insult but your perspective on the issue was also quite important in my opinion.

@mattbrowne Without sign language they can’t become normal human beings.

Many deaf people do not use sign language. They do develop their own forms of language. I think this statement is way too broad to be accurate.

Okay. But how would we develop language without knowing how to think, first?

@tinyfaery good point

@IchtheosaurusRex – I didn’t mean to insult anyone… I thought that was really clear. =/

I didn’t think was an insult either. Worded incorrectly but I understood the question and I had really never pondered this myself.

@Clair – How is it worded incorrectly? I mean, I’d like to change it.

I’m not sure how I would change it, I just understand where the both of you are coming from. Maybe more like “How do deaf people’s thought process’ work without speech?” or something like that. You got your point across though. I knew what you meant.

My wife was not insulted by this question, so I don’t think it’s that big a deal.

@RedPowerLady – Yes, as long as they develop their own forms of language and actually communicate with others this way it should be fine. Kaspar Hauser was a feral child in Germany in the early 19th century, though not deaf he had been deprived of learning a language.

@troubleinharlem , the quip I gave you was sort of knee-jerk. You have to look at the way your question appears on the front page:

“How can deaf people think?”

The details don’t show until you open the question, and by that time, I had already formed a first impression. I am keenly sensitive to the challenges facing people with disabilities, and I thought the question was insensitive at best. I take you at your word that you were looking for information, not intending an insult – but it’s quite possible to be insulting without meaning to be. Corporations spend huge amounts of money on awareness training for employees precisely because of this.

@IchtheosaurusRex ; I don’t have any corporate training… I’m sorry.

Many theories say that we’re all born with the capacity to acquire language, but as we get older, our language acquisition capabilities decrease. The language could be auditory, nasal, breathy, composed of clicks, sonorous, have a written form, not have a written form (Navajo and more than half of the world’s languages do not have written forms), and could be visual. Basically, our brains, starting before birth, very quickly pick up, first, the inflections and rhythms, then the code (words), that it needs to communciate with the world. Deaf babies from deaf families that sign acquire language the same way hearing babies from hearing families do, even if it’s visual. For kids who have zero-obstacles to acquiring language (regardless of what kind of language), they first learn the grammar and concrete concepts, then quickly go on to learning abstract concepts at the same developmental rate, including deaf babies with no language barrier. This is proven research if you want to delve into that.
The perception/processing of concepts between deaf and hearing people are about as different as it would be for a Spanish and Chinese speaker. There might be cultural variations and different interpretations based on experience, but the life-concepts are not much different. Think of how difficult it is to explain concepts of time, mercy, values, friendship, love, patriotism, etc… in English alone? The same concepts exist in American Sign Language (ASL) with the same challenges; however, ASL is capable of expressing a wider range of emotions and spatial concepts than English, much like German having the word “zietgiest” or Czech having “litost” which are not translatable to English.
So, how to deaf people think? If they have language, then not much different than hearing people, except the terms and words attached to explain their thoughts might be in ASL (or French Sign Language, or Italian Sign Language, or even English… you get the idea).
But only less than 10% of deaf babies are born to deaf parents who sign. Which means 90% might have some degree of an obstacle or a delay in acquiring language, which accounts for the “second language quirks” in many deaf writers’ English use. Oddly enough… and not sufficiently researched, is that fact that many of them develop into perfectly fine adults based on acquiring information from the behavoral and social cues around them. Feral children are different—they have been deprived of all language and social interactions, and I can assure you, there aren’t any feral deaf kids running around. They’ve acquired something, even if they were limited to observing others.
(Cough, cough. ) I don’t think my grammar’s or thinking skills are too bad… and I’m profoundly Deaf, a fluent daily ASL user, an English teacher, an actor and a published writer…

I still can’t wrap my head around how Helen Killer learned language – being blind deaf and dumb. Where to even begin???? A tap means… what… to a child in the quiet darkness.

Gulp. She wasn’t dumb, just unable to speak, at first. Calling a Deaf or Blind person “dumb” in this day and age is to go the way of Mark Twain and use the N word all over again. That being said, gently I hope, I’ll offer an answer @seazen
She learned language the same way babies do- through repetition and connecting objects with words (think, a parent saying ball, ball or cat, cat over and over again). The only difference is Anne Sullivan did this by forcing tactile connections between the object and hand movement (sign). She started much later, but as I understand it, she was schooled for 12, 14 hours a day all the way through college, and was able to catch up. She was taught to speak, verbally, as well, again through rigorous repetition and practice.
It’s also a misconception that Helen was totally dense before Annie swooped into her life. Helen actually made up a way to communicate with her best friend, a little African American girl and was able to get around the family farm independently- she was a smart, smart cookie who knew how to survive, manipulate for her own wishes and play with her friend. She was just not civilized (an embarassment for her genteel Southern family) and couldn’t communicate using language.
I want to emphasize- the tactile approach is used only with Deaf-Blind children, not Deaf or Blind children. It’s called tactile signing and might take more time and effort, but it’s still a nuanced and detailed way to communicate.

@linguaphile That was a great explanation; thank you for enriching my understanding.

Actualy, gulp, I looked her up and instead of basing what I’d read about her forty something years ago – I discovered why she was able to overcome it:

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain”, which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington,the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family.

And I had an image of someone else, someone who had never experienced sight and sound at all – thus deaf and dumb, so to speak. Althought I am still completely iin awe and admiration of this amazing person.

How could one think that Blind deaf and dumb, with regards specifically to Helen Keller, could mean anything else? What, that dumb = stupid?

Welcome to fluther, newb, you’re on a pretty high Politically Correct horse there – let’s see if you’re consistant.

Good research, seazen, and glad you took the time to clear up a common misconception. I adore Helen too, but for completely different reasons. Perhaps more misconceptions will be cleared up over time? Isn’t that what Fluther’s for?

Agreed.

Even people who can hear don’t always have that little “inner voice” narrating their thoughts simply because not all of us think in words. While I can think in words, it’s not my native language; I am highly visual. In that respect, I would have to guess that deaf people think similarly to those with high-functioning autism or Aspergers; a bit more visually/conceptually than normal people.

Of course, those who become deaf later in life or are merely hard of hearing probably think more conventionally since they already know how words sound.

How Do Deaf People Think Youtube?