How do deaf people read?
What do they hear in their head.
Do they hear everything that they need?
Or something else instead?
That idea sprang to mind as I was waking up this morning, during that partially waking state before the alarm goes off. Hearing the fan and thinking it was traffic and someone playing “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissett on the street outside my window. Which is odd since my window faces away from the street and my street doesn’t get traffic.
So, any answers to how deaf folks understand rhymes?
Or other semi awake ideas.
I would guess they have no problem with:
Something something something rain
Something something something again
It’s always bothered me.
There is something akin to rhyme in sign language, although it’s really more like alliteration, using repeated handshapes. This video might give you the idea:
But for realizing that words sound the same? Not really. Unless they have some hearing they don't hear anything when they read. It's just a completely different process to them. You don't invariably subvocalize when you read, right? I mean, sometimes you hear the words in your head, but other times you just read the word and get the meaning but don't "hear" it.
Deaf kids learn to read English a little bit like Chinese kids learn to read Chinese. A written collection of marks stands for a word, rather than a collection of sounds.
Although this varies. A lot of kids who are deaf do have some hearing and do get some sounds, what makes you deaf instead of hard of hearing is when your hearing is bad enough at the normal ranges used in human speech that you can’t understand a normal conversation. Of course some people really are profoundly deaf, but deafness as a social category is all about being unable to understand people when they talk.
To second Lemur866’s link and add another similar one:
There was another relevant short thread entitled Are There Rhymes is Sign Language? here: Are There Rhymes in Sign Language? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board From it Pianodave brings up a link to Awti Answers: What is ASL Rhyme. Here it is, make sure to turn on closed captions to see his speech/ASL as text. there is no sound. Awti Answers: What is ASL Rhyme? - YouTube From this I take him to mean: a spoken rhyme sounds the same, an ASL rhyme “looks” the same as both signed words have similar movements/cadence. The example that Awti uses is “hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle” where for us, just “diddle” and “fiddle” rhyme connected through a singsong cadence. In ASL all three parts would be made engaging with similar visible rhythms. In a 3 beat to match with the cat whiskers sign, we can “fiddle” for 3 strokes, and do a made-up sign of friendly waving to a 3 beat to act as our nonsense word “diddle.”
Also, there are reddit threads about this topic, such as this: Reddit - Dive into anything A deaf user (since 18 months) PyrollisAhFiros says this about the question: what is it like to think? “Honestly, it’s just as if you are reading a book and you form a picture in your head while you read or watching a play and the characters are acting out dramatically to emphasize the tone of the story and you interpret what’s going on.”