You’re absolutely right, my last comment was a bit over the line. OK, I apologize Excalibre, dude. And to you too, xash, for having to step into this (but some interesting reading, anyway, eh?)
Monty- you’re too right there, dude- there’s a subject that will be off to either the PIT or MOD-Warningdom very quickly. I ain’t going there either. 
A friend of mine who teaches at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where nearly all the students are deaf and all the courses are taught in ASL, says that the university admits some students whose reading and writing skills in English aren’t quite up to college-level standards. These are reasonable intelligent people whose education up to that point didn’t emphasize good English reading and writing skills. All the standard for-credit courses at Gallaudet require a fair amount of reading and/or writing (in English) of course, even though all the lecturing and all the conversation between students and teachers is in ASL. The students with reading and writing deficiencies must take remedial not-for-credit courses.
Essentially, this is no different than ordinary colleges that admit students who they think are reasonably intelligent but whose reading and writing skills are not up to college level. Such students will have to take remedial courses in English before they can even start the college courses that are for credit. Many such students do catch up and become good writers and readers and graduate from college. Some don’t and drop out or flunk out.
Not to mention your locale. I’m told that in the UK, TV tends to gravitate toward using a picture-in-picture method where they stick a live interpreter in the corner of the TV, which goes a little way toward explaining why so many UK import movies/shows are uncaptioned. Not sure what the tradition is in other countries, unfortunately.
snerk Should we be calling you Gunga Din instead of Sal?
**Wendell ** is right about the English skills – when I was a visiting student at Gallaudet several years ago, I did a stint as an English tutor. I got a lot of students who had difficulty with tenses. And then there were the foreign students who had a double whammy – trying to learn two languages at the same time. :eek:
By the way, Wendell, is there a cite for the classification of ASL as an artificial language? I’d be curious to read more about it, although I can see why it would fall into that category given its origins.
First I must say my absence in this is unintentional. I made a conciliatory reply following the xash admonishment and I swear I saw it on-screen. Later, checking in, I find no trace and email xash to see if it had been expunge for some reason and waited till I got a reply. In short, the answer was no, no posts were removed.
So, returning now I’d like to say I agree with the need to return to the OP and I am very interested in the posts since. And to Monty: I am a Male.
Originally Posted by lizardling
this is fascinating to me and an area that has always deep intriguing for me. I must say your grammar is far removed from most friends that have been profoundly deaf for all or most of their lives. You say “I also tend to give words shape, color, and motion” and I wonder if these are typically consistent or do they change with context? Like referring to your father, or a religious figure type of Father. For instance, if you are thinking “My father went to his Church to meet with the Church Fathers” does that word look different in shape/color/motion?
I hope you don’t mind these questions but it is a area that has help a special fascination for me for decades.
Thanks – I highly suspect it was because my parents made the choice to start out with Signed Exact English and encouraged me to read as much as possible as a small child. So I ended up with a very serious library habit. g Later on, though, I shifted to PSE/CASE as I grew up, so I have listening fluency in ASL.
In your example, the two types of ‘fathers’ are different – ‘my father’ is shaped like the ASL sign for father, while Fathers isn’t. But ‘church’ is like the sign in both contexts, and is a pale buttergold color as well.
I don’t know if this has been said already…
back to the OP. Just to add my two cents worth: when I was taking ASL a couple of years back, we were given the stat that most Deaf people were at about a third grade reading level. I wouldn’t consider that illiterate; its surely enough to get by, but they won’t be cracking open a copy of Pride and Prejudice any time soon.
I keep saying I’m going to keep up on my signing somehow, but I never do. Maybe I’ll look into that, but I’ll most likely forget and never do it.
I should mention that this does not match what I know of its origins. I understood it to essentially have formed as a creole of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language and French Sign Language; that’s as natural a language origin as any. As far as I know, it was not deliberately invented by anyone.
The question is what the words “artificial language” mean. ASL was created deliberately at a specific time:
It did not arise spontaneously in the way that most creoles did. Some people sat down at a specific time and place and said, “Let’s create a sign language for the deaf people that we’re working with.” They combined signs from the existing Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language and Old French Sign Language. Esperanto was created using the roots of words in a lot of European languages, but it was a deliberate creation, not something that arose spontaneously. Part of the problem is the the distinction artificial/natural is not either/or but more of a spectrum. This is really an argument about definitions, and please let’s not have an argument about definitions. Let’s not sidetrack this thread again with a nasty argument. If you want to call it a natural language, do so. Please, please, please let’s not argue about this.
Incidentally, since ASL was formed partly from Old French Sign Language, it’s closer to (modern) French Sign Language than to British Sign Language. This is why the captioning with sign language of British TV programs would be useless for speakers of ASL. ASL is quite different from the British Sign Language, so those sign language captions would mean nothing to Americans. ASL, French Sign Language, and British Sign Language are all different languages and are not mutually intelligible, although ASL and French Sign Language are close enough that speakers might occasionally recognize words in the other’s language, somewhat like the way that Spanish and Portuguese speakers might occasionally recognize words in the other’s language.
Wendell: Could be worse. The thread could’ve been hijacked to a discussion about Gestuno.
Wendell,
From the link you’ve provided (bolding in the quote below is mine):
That link is a good read, btw.
Well, counting my employees and the friends of my Ex, we knew around a dozen hearing imparied people (oddly, almost all women). Every single one of them read a lot and very well. And, my Ex, who was a ASL translator for the Government has already weighed in on this “That’s bullshit”. Note that “Close Captioning for the Hearing Impaired” is very popular. In fact, from my personal experiences and how popular Closed Captioning is, I’d have to say the reverse is true- hearing impaired people read better than hearing dudes. They read TDD aka TTY, the read Closed captioing, they Text rather than talk, etc.
http://www.robson.org/capfaq/overview.html
Can captioning be used for literacy education?
Absolutely! A number of studies have shown that captioning is an invaluable aid to teaching people to read, and to teaching English as a second language. Here’s some of that research:
According to this webpage, the average deaf 17- or 18-year-old has a fourth-grade reading level:
Just to throw a little anecdotal experience into the mix:
I’m profoundly hearing impaired, and have been since about the 3rd grade. I’ve always attended public schools and never learned ASL. I just learned to adapt in my own ways.
I’m a technical writer by trade, so obviously my reading/writing level is quite high. I’ve also developed highly impressive lip-reading skills
To show you how crazy I am, I worked telephone tech support for nearly 2 years :smack:
Now for the anecdotal part. My biggest experience with the Deaf world was attending a summer camp in H.S. at the Ohio School for the Deaf. I was the only person there not completely deaf (mom thought it would be a good experience for me). I knew not a whit of sign language and it was like moving to a foreign country! Everybody signs to everyone else, and to me. Trying to talk back was of course useless. I had to very quickly learn some basic sign language (common everyday words and phrases, and use the alphabet to spell out everything else).
ASL does indeed have it’s own grammar structure, completely different than English. Spelling out every word I didn’t know got to be pretty tiring so I eventually resorted to writing a lot of notes to my newfound friends. I found them all to be quite literate, only you had to keep in mind that they wrote using the ASL grammatical structure. So instead of “John went to the gym”, they would write something like “John go gym”. If you didn’t know any better you would think that their reading comprehension level was sub par, but these were very intelligent kids.
No one’s saying that deaf people are stupid. Just that they lack literacy in English. If they’re “using the ASL grammatical structure”, then they’re not really literate in English (assuming that’s how they always wrote. It wouldn’t be surprising for some deaf people to write notes in something more akin to ASL than English, even if they had a full command of written English.) If they couldn’t read and write English properly, then yeah, their reading comprehension and command of English was sub-par. That doesn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. It means they weren’t fully literate in English.
I’m not saying that anybody is saying that. I did forget to mention that they had no problem reading MY notes, and I didn’t mince words. Of course, handwritten notes between teens != reading comprehension at the college level, I’m just sharing my experience.
I think that this may be the problem- HI dudes who use ASL as their first language *do * have problems with English grammar and syntax. This may be why some studies have shown them as testing poorly. Thus, under some definitions of “English literacy” they may not do so well. As well all know- using test designed for “normal” dudes get strange results when applied to those outside the test-makers experience.
But those of us with personal experience have all said that as far as reading and getting basic understanding from what you read- HI dudes do just fine. Thus, the line from the OP *“They don’t read English. It’s very difficult to learn English if you’re nonhearing. A lot of them don’t bother. Or they learn just enough to read menus and bus signs.” * is (as my HI Ex said) “bullshit”.
…How did *that * work? :eek:
And I’m also a tech writer, by the way. I was mainstreamed pretty much all my life except for a span of four years in elementary where my parents sent me to CID in STL so that I could learn to lipread and have intensive speech therapy. I still don’t have the world’s greatest lipreading skills, although most people tell me I’m reasonably clear (albeit with a Deaf accent).
Wendell, thanks for the explanation and apologies for the semi-hijack. 
Given Monty’s comment, I won’t even touch the Gestuno, although that name’s ringing a few very faint bells.
Yanno. Last time we had a public speaker up here talking about a local village in the Middle East somewhere where linguists were studying the sign language that folks were using over there, the hall was pert near to packed with Deaf people. I have to wonder if that would have happened if the speaker had been, for example, a professor of Spanish, etc. It’s interesting to see how much ASL tends to bond people together, IMO.
It actually worked fairly well, once I got over a few hurdles. As any hearing impaired person knows, it’s not just being able to hear speech on a volume level, we also have problems distinguishing words when lip reading can’t be done. I found that if I could eliminate background noise and significantly improve the clarity and quality of the sound in my headset (Plantronics, the best!), I could with concentration and practice have a conversation with about an 85% success rate. What I couldn’t make out or hear, I could usually piece together with educated guesswork, or simply ask them to repeat what they said. I already do this with general and telephone conversation, when it comes to tech support you are dealing with a relatively restricted subject matter so my “fill in the blanks” accuracy significantly improves.
It can get pretty tiring after a while and to this day I’m generally not keen on having extended telephone conversations, and listening to the radio is a real bitch. And sometimes my brain just totally misses the mark filling in missing works, with rather amusing and sometimes embarassing results!
lately I’ve become rather spoiled with Ip-Relay services, so my skills in this regard have started to erode. I guess I’ll have to go back to using the phone to keep em sharp.
Amazing. First though, may I ask what PSE/CASE is? Second, the color aspect is fascinating. Do you ever consciously assign a color to things of is it a subconscious result. Do they seem to ever have a pattern? Such as, do angry, ugly things have red/violet/black associations automatically assigned to them or is there nothing so common as that? Is there a shape/color for Love?
Sorry. I could go on and on with this but I regret the feeling I will never be able to see it.
When we were sharing an apartment he found out that I was color blind (color deficient actually) and he repeatedly told me how sorry he was for me because he can’t imagine going through life not having the many colors that were all around. Needless to say, this was very touching to me for a friend that cannot hear music or birds to regret my loss of one aspect of my sight.
Your statement that
I find to be very true. I have taught ASL to many friends, especially back then, and it has always had that effect. One of those friends that I taught later had a son that was HI and it was years later that I ran into him and found this out. He said it had been so much easier for him to understand and accept at the very beginning because of the little ASL he already knew but mostly because of all the great HI people he had come to know back then.
Thanks for your insights.