I’ve seen several movies/tv shows (This Close/Everything’s Gonna Be OK/Only Murders in the Building/A Quiet Place) involving deaf people where the the deaf person will communicate via signing (and subtitles on screen) and then hearing people will reply back to them with simultaneous signing and saying out loud what they sign (with no subtitles on screen). This applies to both characters who are partially deaf and fully deaf.
Is this a common real life practice or something invented by movie people to make there be less subtitles to read? Especially, I’m wondering, if it is a real practice, is it common to say things at normal volume or do people just mouth the words instead?
It seems like it would be reinforcing behavior for both the hearing person signing and the deaf person. For the hearing person, to whom ASL is a second language, speaking at the same time they sign probably helps them work through what they’re trying to sign.
For deaf people it gives them reinforcement of being able to read the hearing person’s lips moving as well as the signs. Unless “all deaf people are experts at reading lips” is a TV / movie trope, which is quite possible. Can most deaf people typically read lips?
I don’t have much experience with ASL other than teaching some signing to our kids when they were still more or less pre-verbal. It was a thing at the time-- supposedly it helped hearing toddlers understand concepts of speech before they were actually able to talk. I don’t know whether it actually helped, but seeing a 2 year old simultaneously ask for ‘miwk’ and make the sign for milk, which is pantomiming milking a cow’s teat, is freakin’ adorable as heck.
At my agency, I had deaf employees, so I was trained in ASL (and I remember little of it) and yes, you do both, because many are not entirely deaf, so they hear soemthing and they also read your lips. Signing and speaking works far better than just signing.
My girlfriend is an ASL interpreter, so I’ll run this by her and will have a fuller answer later.
My understanding (I barely know ASL) is that no, they don’t sign while saying what they’re signing. They really can’t because ASL and English aren’t 1:1 compatible (things like Signed Exact English notwithstanding). So they take this ASL idea and convert it into English, then they take the English reply and convert it into ASL.
When the exact word is needed, the interpreter will often sign the ASL concept and then mouth the English word. The example I like to use is That was a bitchin’ concert! The terp would just sign That was a great concert! but would mouth the word bitchin’ to try to keep the nuance there.
That’s for terps. For random guy who learned a little ASL so he could talk to his deaf friend, yeah, there’s probably some mouthing going on as well.
I’m leaning toward them doing it so that they can cut down on subtitles.
Okay, her answer is that it’s called simcomming, simultaneous communications, and that it’s really hard to do. It’s also normally bad practice because the speaker’s weaker language–probably the ASL–will suffer. It might be compared to writing something in Spanish while reading the same thing aloud in English.
Most often, simcomming is done for quick introductions and rote speeches and then quickly dropped. Hi, Thomas. I’m Greyson. This is Betty from Payroll. Thank you for calling Shalmanese Incorporated. How may I direct your call?
Thanks! This is what I intuitively thought. A lot of the shows I listed above have deaf creators or heavy involvement from deaf consultants for the deaf scenes so it’s strange to me that they would make this seem like a normal communication style and not call it out any way.
One of the few things I liked about Four Weddings and a Funeral was that they threw that trope under the bus by having Hugh Grant (the main character) interpretting his cousin’s sign language (shown to viewers in the subtitles) to others – and often stopping or changing the interpretation because the cousin was saying (signing) something rude.
“He says he remembers you – uh…that you came from a town near the mountains.”