If a person is born deaf, as opposed to losing their hearing after being old enough to hear and speak normally, are they more or less likely to be adept at lip-reading,l since those who once could hear would have a memory of what sounds are made using various mouth shapes? Or does that not make a difference?
Along similar lines, do deaf people “hear” sounds in their dreams, and are they more or less likely (or no difference) to do so if they lost their hearing later as opposed to being born deaf?
How different is signing “vernacular” from region to region? Does a New Englander have a whole set of singing “slang” that differs greatly from a West Coast resident?
(Hearing, studying ASL for 3 years) ASL is highly regional. Here in NYC we use considerably more finger spelling and “lexicalized” signs (abbreviations based on fingerspelled words, like JB meaning job - possibly due to influence if The Rochester School, a school for the deaf in upstate NY which experimented with using finger spelling as the only form of signing ), and also habitually sign really really fast. There are variations in vocabulary depending on location. Place names in particular can vary a lot, but so can simple nouns – there are at least three signs for dog that I can think of. That’s why it’s important for a sign language student to select a dictionary written in their region.
The answer to #1 will vary based on the early experiences of the deaf person and the forms of communication others around him use. I can’t recall the name of the person, but in one of the books I read for my ASL class, a man says that when he was a young child he didn’t know he couldn’t hear. He thought all people communicated by lip-reading and that he was just bad at it.
#2 is unknown. I sat in on a lecture by Peter Hauser, a deaf neuroscience researcher and he wasn’t sure there was a clear answer to the question. His impression was that when a hearing person dreams, they aren’t physically hearing sounds, they are dreaming of the sounds therefore the “hearing” parts of the brain are stimulated and made to think they are hearing sounds. A deaf person who lost their hearing may do the same thing when dreaming since the brain knows what sound is and those parts of the brain have been stimulated before. A deaf person who has never heard sound before would not have had those parts of their brain stimulated, therefore they would not know what to do with that information.
So deaf New Yawkers sign quickly the way hearing New Yawkers speak quickly? Color me shocked!
How similar are the three signs for “dog” in appearance? Are they variations of each other (where you can sort of see how one would shift over time to another) or just completely unrelated and someone unfamiliar with that regional version wouldn’t be able to puzzle it out at all?
They are all totally different
In one, you slap your thigh and snap as if calling a dog to you
In one you take your right hand and palm-fwd flick it past your ear a couple times, as a dog scratches it’s ear.
The third is lexicalized and is formed by D-G but with an inward flick that also suggests snapping your fingers.
It’s basically like pop, soda, and coke, as three words for fizzy beverages depending on location.
for #3: in Brazil we have our own sign language, called Libras, which is based on gestures. For instance, for “Pimenta” (Pepper) the sign is to wave your hand in front of your mouth.
Sign language is quite practical - you can talk with someone on the other side of the street without the need to yell. And I am pretty damm sure those guys talk about hearing people on their backs, just like on this comic. hehehe.
Do you think it’s the sort of thing that someone who normally uses the “here boy” thigh slap version would be quickly able to figure out the “scratching the ear” version? What I mean is, are adept Signers REALLY good at charades, to put it another way?
According to my deaf co-worker, the “Here, boy” motion is the “grown-up” way of signing “dog”, and the “scratching the ears” thing would only be used for something like reading a children’s book to a deaf child. Does that seem accurate?
Signers are really good at charades, yes, but charade- like signing has its own characteristics that clue the correct interpretation. Someone encountering an unknown sign in a stream of regular, conventional signs isn’t necessarily going to work out the meaning any more than an English speaker would automatically know what susurration means the first time they came across it. However, once you know what it means, it’s easy to see how the form relates to the meaning.
I don’t know much about ASL, but in Australia, there are two distinct dialects of Australian Sign Language. Most Deaf people know both, and can understand signs from the other dialect even if they themselves don’t use it. You also get ‘school’ dialects, where people from the same Deaf school have signs they use with each other. Those signs are less well known by outsiders. Now most of the Deaf schools have closed, so those ‘dialects’ are dying out.
No, for born-deaf, not truly correlative, and adept signers often dream in sign (when communicating with people)
Yes, amazingly so. Think of any face-to-face community without (previously, and still on a day-to-day basis. Geographical distances can be surprisingly small for completely different words or usage.
You’re trying to establish a universal rule, and I’m trying to say there isn’t one. I’m sure what your friend said is 100% true for wherever it is you live. My impression is that here in NYC the “here boy” sign has a midwestern-aw-shucks association.
One of the first things I encountered in the Dope was this article, which I sent to a coworker who’d mentioned a deaf-from-birth nephew. She said it explained a lot about the difficulties her nephew had.