Thanks for this thread; this is really fascinating to me. Hearing people often vocalize without the intention of communicating to someone else. For instance, I talk to myself to help organize my thoughts. If I hit myself on the hand with a hammer, I’ll yell “OW!” and then commence cursing out the hammer. Do you (or, if you can speak to it, deaf people in general) sign outside of talking to someone else?
Sorry, I feel like I haven’t expressed that as well as I’d like, but I hope you can understand what I’m getting at. I guess one thing I’m wondering is whether the instinct to cry out when surprised or suddenly hurt remains the same in deaf people as in hearing people, or whether deaf people translate the same instinct into sign or lose it altogether.
What about learning to read? Sure, reading is visual, but I (a hearing person) learned to read by being read to, long after the age of 30 months. How did you learn?
Actually, yes, I do. I have seen many other deaf people do this as well. But I will also say things out loud, like OW or my favorite expletive(s). I don’t think deaf people do one or the other, but rather a lot of both. After all, it’s hard to sign OW after you burned your finger on a hot stove. You just scream expletives. The same is true for deaf people
Reading lips is HARD. IIRC only 2% of deaf people can read lips. It’s not as easy as many suppose it is.
Having said that, it depends on the person whose lips I’m reading. If they’re unnaturally exaggerating their mouth movements, it makes it harder for me to understand what they’re saying. Facial hair also makes it hard. But there are people who I have no trouble at all lipreading–it’s like second nature with them. Others, not so much. Maybe it’s the accent.
I don’t want to be rude, but are you Deaf as well as deaf?
And what is the root cause of that controversy?
Also, I am somewhat puzzled that you have no concept of sounds–at 30 months, alot of kids are already speaking/expressing–and they should be. Do you mean 3 months?
My daughter started talking at 14 months, my sons a bit later, but all understood me, and hearing is of course, tested for even at birth.
Color me confused that you have no concept of sound. Is it that you have no memory of sound?
Lastly, is there such a thing as sign language slang? Do teens make up their own signs to get around teachers etc like hearing teens do?
And did you like “Children of a Lesser God” or did it bother you (wasn’t there a controversy about it at the time?).
Great thread, btw.
I get the impression through movies and such that the deaf population enjoys concerts as much as the hearing population does. Did you go to concerts before the Cochlear implant was present? Can you describe the sensation…what the music is like for you? If you do attend concerts, who are your favorite musicians?
Well, the ASL signs for “more”, “me”, “baby”, “milk”, “love”, “mommy”, “daddy”, “dog”, “hungry”, “want”, “silly”, etc, are exactly the same signs in SEE. No difference. SEE just takes ASL signs and puts them in english word order and imposes english grammar conventions. When you’re talking with a baby you aren’t worried much about correcting their grammar are you?
Like you said, reading is visual, so there are other ways for parents to teach their children to read. If you learned to read by listening to someone read, a deaf child could learn to read by seeing someone else signing out a book. The associations are still there.
Long story, but in a nutshell, “deaf” is an adjective while “Deaf” is a noun. There are many reasons why deaf people want to make the distinction, chief among them to dispel the thought that deafness is disability. For self-identified “Deaf” people, deafness is about the culture, not the loss of hearing. This is why, as another poster said, “Deaf” people can get upset when one of their own gets a cochlear implant.
That’s correct. I know that there is sound and how it works, but I don’t remember what it sounds like. That went along with my memory of it.
Oh, there is definitely sign language slang. For sure.
It’s a good movie. I hadn’t heard of a controversy but I can imagine why the controversy would exist.
Oh, we definitely enjoy music. Our tactile sense is just as important as our sight. It’s rather easy to feel the difference between bass sounds and treble sounds (easier than it is with my cochlear implant, I have to say).
Before my cochlear implant, I went to see Santana, CSNY, Billy Joel, Elton John. Santana and CSNY I enjoyed, Billy Joel and Elton John I only went because I got a cute girl to come with me.
I’m not sure how to describe the sensation. But I’d wager you could get a good feel (no pun intended) for it by putting in earplugs and curling up on the floor next to a powerful subwoofer.
Certainly not, but that wasn’t my reason for asking. SEE doesn’t just use ASL signs in English order with English grammar. True, that is a lot of it, but SEE is heavy on initialized signs amongst other differences … namely, endings are added (-ing, -ed), plurals are indicated (-s, -es, -ies). I realize you may be implying exactly that when you say “imposes english grammar conventions,” but the initializing is a glaring difference.
I hear, and lipread to suppliment. I was a machinist for a number of years and learned to lipread because of hearing protection and the ambient noise. It is handy, because I have extremely good high end and low end hearing, but am slightly lacking in human vocal range and can miss what people say if there is ambient noise in the same range.
<I was a guinea pig for the sound lab at the Submarine base here in Groton, they used me to listen for noise embedded in either white or pink noise. I stopped testing one day for 3 hours while they tracked down the 60 cycle hum that using the PC to generate the signals instead of the signal generator that had broken down. Yes, people can be that sensitive.>
When I see a cute girl signing, or hear the distinctive accent of the speaking deaf, I find it strongly attractive… in the same exotic way a french accent would be.
I realize your a guy, so may not know, but are “deafaphiles” like me common, and do deaf women make jokes about us?
Are there signing dialects? For example, if someone is signing ASL, can you tell what part of the country they’re from? And are there ethnic dialects as well?
I can’t be certain, of course, but this sounds to me like the effect I get when switching stations on the radio. If it’s the middle of a song, for a moment (or several), I don’t hear the song, only a bunch of noise that makes no sense. It takes a bit for my brain to assemble it into rhythm, melody and accompaniment. My WAG would be that while you now have the chochlea to “hear”, your neurons aren’t organizing the sound in a meaningful way in your brain.
Yes, but initialized signs are usually for synonyms of the commonly used ASL sign. As I’m sure you know, ASL has a sign “big”. But it also includes pretty much all english synonyms for “big”…an ASL translator would use “big” when interpreting for someone who said “huge”, “gigantic”, “enormous”, etc etc. ASL doesn’t have the same library of synomymous worlds with subtle gradiations of meaning that english does. But of course ASL can convey subtle gradiations of meaning in other ways…by size, placement, speed, repitition, etc of the signs. Of course you can do the same thing with SEE, but you can also declare that the ASL “big” sign with an “e” handshape means exactly “enormous”, with “g” it means exactly “gigantic”, with “h” it means exactly “huge”. 90% of the time though if you aren’t trying to interpret something exactly and were just using SEE to talk, you’d just sign “big” same as in ASL. If you’re talking with a baby you’d just use “big”, whether you’re talking or signing or both.
Same with adding plurals…in SEE you’d make an “s” handshape after a sign to indicate a plural, in ASL you’d repeat the sign. But not a big deal. Same with verb endings…the reality is that most people who sign SEE unless they are deaf kids raised with SEE or educators or parents or other really commited people don’t bother with most of the gramtical niceties that SEE has. SEE grades into pidgin signed english.
Initializing, adding verb endings and plurals may seem like a big difference, but it doesn’t seem…glaring…to me. And all that goes out the window when talking baby talk with a baby…you’re using simple signs, done slowly, with simple grammar if you use any grammar at all. I mean, you’re mostly just asking if they want “more”, if they want “daddy” or “mommy”, or if they can “see dog” or what have you. And you’re probably also using voice at the same time, so the baby can begin to get the grammar from the english voicing you’re doing.
If you have a deaf child, of course it is much more important to use ASL or more strict SEE grammar to give the child complete language, but for a hearing baby who is getting english it isn’t such a big deal. All in my opinion, of course.
It means what you think it does. Locally, it can refer to the Washington Monument (because of their identical shapes) or, more widely, the Fuddruckers restaurant chain.
