Two more then: If it was a hearing child that would be deaf by age 3 without the implant, would you support their decision to withhold the implants or their right to make such a determination? What about actually rendering a child deaf so that it could partake in their community?
The reason I ask is merely to understand where you might draw the line of parental authority. Some folks have asserted it to IMO scary lengths before. Personally, I cannot justify withholding a completely beneficial treatment from a child merely on parental whim.
Since cochlear implantation is elective surgery, and I believe that parental prerogative trumps my own as an audiologist regarding the issue of whether or not to implant, I would have to respect the parents decision regarding the cochlear implant either way, even if I feel that the child in this particular example would be considered an excellent candidate for implantation.
If you mean deaf parents taking steps to intentionally render their child deaf, I would have to say that I find that concept a little odd. While I have heard of deaf parents wishing that an expected baby will be born deaf, I’ve never heard of parents actually taking steps to make it so. That’s kind of on par with parents gouging a kid’s eyes out so that they can have a blind child.
I’m imagining parents slipping gentamycin into the kid’s drink… :eek:
Cochlear implantation is an elective surgery, and the absence of a cochlear implant does not affect the potential recipient’s physical well-being in any way. This isn’t really on par with parents that withhold potentially life-saving treatment on religious grounds, if that’s what you’re thinking of in your previous post.
Most of what I know about cochlear implants and the debate surrounding them I learned from reading about actress Amy Ecklund, who had cochlear implant surgery in 1999.
While the debate over cochlear implants centers around parents making decisions for their children, Amy’s story, which can be found in this People Magazine article, provides a good perspective on what it’s like to receive implants.
Cochlear implantation is an elective surgery, and the absence of a cochlear implant does not affect the potential recipient’s physical well-being in any way. This isn’t really on par with parents that withhold potentially life-saving treatment on religious grounds, if that’s what you’re thinking of in your previous post.
Oh, really? What if the child gets fatally run over by some drunk moron who thinks it might be fun to try driving on the sidewalk? What if the child decides that being a part of the deaf community isn’t worth the trouble that deafness invariably causes? What if the child expresses great interest in a career or activity that is invariably off-limits to deaf people? The parents would be doing serious and irreversible harm to their child just so he/she would be more like them. That is just plain messed up.
Parental authority should always be considered secondary to what’s best for the child. Unless there is a logical reason why being part of the deaf community would better than being able to hear, i’d have to say that being being deaf is not what’s best.
“I was born severely-to-profoundly deaf. In the early 1980s, I was seen at the House Ear Institute
in Los Angeles for evaluation as a possible candidate for a cochlear implant (when these devices
were still in the investigational stage).”
You, too huh? I met with Dr. House, when I was younger, in 1974 I think. He said it was too new & only like 4 tones or something. How would I know? He didn’t know how to communicate with a deaf person anyway.
Asking deaf people to have an implant is akin to having black people have an operation to be made into white people. It’s absurd & as the person above said, silly.
handy - While I fully support your right to choose not to have an implant (and the right of parents to make that choice for their children), I also support the rights of people who want to make surgical changes which they feel are appropriate.
According to the People article I cited, over 2000 people in the U.S. have had implant surgery. Clearly not all deaf people find it “absurd” or “silly”. Amy Ecklund has had a very positive experience with her implant, and now speaks out about the procedure to others. Do you also think that all forms of hearing aids are absurd and silly? What about eyeglasses? Prostheses for people who have lost limbs? What about cosmetic surgery? All of these are choices made by people who feel that for them surgery would significantly improve their lives.
this is kind of late, but this really bugged me, so…
matt_mcl said:
Rickjay said:
um, no no. matt is right, you are completely incorrect. language acquisition is instinctive, and happens whenever a pre-pubescent human is exposed to language- any kind of language. yeah, we have exquisitely evolved mouth parts that are fantastic for verbal communication, ears too, but it’s the brain that handles language acquisition, and if you grow up in a world where everybody signs and nobody talks, guess what- you will learn how to sign, and not how to speak. effortlessly. without trying, just like children learn spoken languages. your brain doesn’t care. a pair of hands and eyes will work just as well* as a pair of ears and a mouth for communication. hands are way more versatile than a tongue. except maybe for gene simmons.
read a book on child language acquisition. i guarantee it will blow your mind.
-fh
*some people, like my linguistics professor, said hands and eyes are in a way better than ears and mouth. spoken language is limited by the fact that it has to be linear. sign does not have this disability, i mean, limitation. hehe.
Horsefeathers. Forcing it on an unwilling person is indeed an indefensible usurpation of one’s right to self-determination. But the only absurd or silly thing is making the comparison that you have done. What, if anything, can a formerly deaf person with a cochlear implant no longer do? Getting an implant is merely granting extra ability to a person, no different than taking any other corrective measure. Leg braces, artificial limbs, corrective eyewear, even pacemakers are all geared towards enhancing an ability or granting one that formerly did not exist. There is nothing insidious going on whatsoever.
“over 2000 people in the U.S. have had implant surgery”
Is that all? It’s been around for about 20 years, so that’s only 100 per year…
“some people, like my linguistics professor, said hands and eyes are in a way better than ears
and mouth. spoken language is limited by the fact that it has to be linear. sign does not have this
disability, i mean, limitation”
It sure does, even more than a written language. ASL has a specific grammer structure that has to be followed, it’s much more strict than written english.
“What, if anything, can a formerly deaf person with a cochlear implant no longer do?”
You missed the point, obviously, first, they are still very deaf, as a matter of fact, more deaf than before! Yes, they can hear with the implant; but ONLY if they have the hearing aid on that comes with it! The hearing aid is attached to the head like a magnet (Yes, you can stick refrigerator magnets on it too). Because they often cut the aural nerve when doing an implant, when a person doesn’t wear the hearing aid part of the implant (taking a shower, sleeping, sports, probably sex too) they are completely deaf! No sound at all zippo!..
Well, I see RoboDude is now advocating forcing implant surgery on people…for their own good, of course.
Pathetic. Haven’t you been paying attention? So you feel that all deaf kids should be forced to have the implant? I understand that you wouldn’t force it on deaf ADULTS. But, since the implants are good, they should be implanted in every deaf child, regardless of the parent’s wishes, since the parents are not as qualified as you are to make these choices?
After all, you know best.
You are saying that my brother and his wife are child abusers because they haven’t implanted my nephew. What are you, some kind of [insert derogatory comment here]? You do realize that unlike the kids you cited, my nephew isn’t going to die without an implant, right? You do realize that you have absolutely no experience with deafness, right? You do realize that you are absolutely ignorant on this subject, right?
Sorry if this seems angry, but I get angry when people say that my nephew should be forced by the state to have dangerous and controversial elective surgery.
That’s simply not true. ASL is a much simpler language than English and doesn’t really have much in the way of sentence structure or grammar at all; ASL has no verbal tenses and lacks the conjunctions and articles that structure English (or any other spoken language.) “I am buying a newspaper” is “I buy newspaper” in ASL; “My sister is going to the library” is usually “Sister go library.” “What did Jim buy”? is “J I M buy what?” I don’t see how ASL is “stricter” than English given it has next to no rules and a fifth the vocabulary, if that.
I mean, I don’t men to knock ASL, but there IS a reason that people who converse in ASL don’t write in it.
It is a fact, no matter how you might want to deny it, that homo sapiens is genetically predisposed to the use of spoken language, even if other forms of language are used; after all, the fact I’m typing right now doesn’t mean I don’t speak. I guess we can engage in a cite-the-reference war now, so I’ll gather my resources…
Well, duh. That doesn’t negate the truth of the human drive to use speech.
No offense, but this is just bafflingly nonsensical. How is, say, ASL less “Linear” than spoken English? Any language involves the sequential communication of individual concepts to form a whole idea. ASL throws out words in a linear fashion, just like any other language.
Which just goes to show, again, that you are ignorant about ASL. It’s like complaining that German is more primitive than English because it doesn’t use the same grammar. ASL has grammar, it’s just a different form of grammar than english. That doesn’t make it grammarless!
Plenty of spoken languages lack the conjunctions and articles that in English are used to indicate subject and object or tense.
To give an example. In english I would say, “I help you”, or “you help me” or “they help her”. In ASL this can be done with only one sign HELP. Whether you help me or I help you or they help her is indicated by the direction your hands move, and where the subjects and objects have been located in physical space.
Vocabulary: Sure, ASL has a smaller formal vocabulary than English, almost every language on the planet has a smaller vocabulary than english. But ASL uses gestural modification to convey fine shades of meaning, where english uses a different word. And since ASL is used by fewer people, it has less of the specialized jargon that has been developed this century. There probably isn’t a sign for “cladistics” or “homomorphy”, but only because there aren’t enough Deaf evolutionary theorists, and even if there are two of them the only people in the world who would use the signs would be them, so they’d invent their own sign. Most other small languages such as Navajo or Basque also lack such vocabulary. If they need them, they invent a word or borrow it.
And the reason people don’t “write” in ASL? Well, our written alphabet is a transciption of the verbal sounds we make with our voices. So an alphabetic script is not suited to ASL. If everyone used sign language we’d have developed some other method of writing. But, since written English is used by the overwhelming majority of people in this country, Deaf kids learn written English rather than written ASL.
I imagine that a written form of sign language would have developed along the lines of chinese pictograms…first as a picture of a person making a sign, then a simplified form, then with markings indicating movement and time, etc. It would probably look nothing like any currently used written language. However, since we already have a well developed written language already, nobody is going to start from the beginning and develop a script just for sign language.
Please, I defy you to come up with even one linguist who thinks sign language isn’t a complete language. It’s not political correctness, it’s just the truth. Sign language is a complete language.
I am apparently still missing the point. So what you are saying is that someone with very minimal hearing (and sometimes none at all) all the time effectively trades that for the ability to hear quite a bit better whenever they wear the hearing aid and not at all when they don’t. Again, why is this a problem, and how does that relate to “Asking deaf people to have an implant is akin to having black people have an operation to be made into white people?”
handy makes a point worth making – that there are definite disadvantages to cochlear implant surgery. One of them is that any residual hearing (in one ear) is destroyed by the surgery. In addition, implant surgery is not always successful. Sometimes it is only partially successful. It is also extremely painful, and takes months of physical and emotional healing to be complete.
For all of these reasons, I don’t believe that anyone should be forced to have the surgery (or to impose it on their children). By the same token, however, because of all of the advantages of the surgery, I also don’t believe that anyone who wants the surgery and is a legitimate medical candidate should be denied that opportunity.
In spite of the 20 years of research, cochlear implant surgery is still a relatively new procedure, which is improving all the time. There are valid arguments on both side of this debate, which is why it makes sense at least for now to leave the decision up to the individual.
This page has links to many articles and scholarly papers on the cochlear implant debate.
if we were genetically predisposed to the use of spoken language, a child in the presence of people who use a spoken language and a signed language would only learn the spoken language. this does not happen. if you expose a child to both types of language, they will learn both of them. we are genetically predisposed to use language, and it does not have to be spoken.
as far as cites, if you want to get started on learning about language, an easily available book that’s well-written is “the language instinct” by steven pinker. alternately, take an introductory linguistics course at your local college. looking at your other posts (“ASL is a much simpler language than english”) you have some serious misconceptions about language.
human drive to use language, sometimes in the form of speech, sometimes in the form of sign. that might be pedantic anywhere else but in this thread.
in ASL you can combine morphemes simultaneously, in spoken english, you have to do it sequentially. the fact that ASL morphemes are signed in three-dimensional space makes this possible. spoken languages have to be sequential because you can’t say three words at once.
my original comment is kind of a joke- generally speaking, all languages are equally good at expressing anything. ASL is not more efficient than english. but the opposite is equally true, yet it remains a very popular belief that sign languages are somehow lesser languages.
ASL is less efficient than english, or for that matter, any other spoken language. With verbal communication I don’t have to keep my eyes on the subject who is speaking at all times. I can communicate at a much farther range then someone who is confined to ASL. And I can communicate with a large percentage of the local population whereas someone dependent on ASL cannot.
“trades that for the ability to hear quite
a bit better whenever they wear the hearing aid and not at all when they don’t.”
Do you see what you forgot? A person can get a hearing aid, they don’t need the implant. Lots of people wear hearing aids. I have a hearing aide sometimes, when she is around.
BTW, implants were pretty ugly for awhile but are better looking today.
ASL includes gloss, markers, emotional communication & nonmanual clues. These things don’t translate to written english very well unless you use the Stoke method (ASL to written english) or try signwiting.org, which converts ASL to tiny pics.