Hi all -
First off, I'm LOVING this discussion, it's something I've wondered about
for years.
Secondly (oh so orderly) I admit I often wondered about the ways that deaf
people think,
because signing (ASL, for example) engages a completely difference
relationship with language and so, one would assume, with thinking also.
...then there are the multi-lingual deaf people who sign in many
languages, ... for me, the absence of an audio tongue in the head is
fascinating only because I'm so audio-centric. What does mental language
sound like when there is no experience with expressive sound?
I'm also reminded of a book by Susan Schwartz and you'll all want to
strangle me symbolically, I'm sure, but it's buried in the book boxes
right now and I can't dig it out and so I can't give a title, but it's
forwarded by Oliver Sacks, and involves this woman's experience as an ESL
teacher working with Hispanics and coming across a deaf illiterate man,
and her experiences in trying to understand his thought processes...
the most striking aspect of this book, for me, was the importance of
narrative - as a labourer, this fellow developed an improvised sign
language with other deaf labourers that enabled them to describe
themselves, to each other, through stories of their experience. Lacking
formal language structure, there was no temporal structure to the stories
and so while these folks lived in realms of "time," it was/is without a
past-present-future grammar: no way to describe the past as differentiated
from the present. AND YET, this differences were understood, in the realms
of experience-narratives.
All in all, I remain absolutely fascinated by the thinking world of ASL
speakers, and if there are any here who have experience with deaf folks,
languages, and thinking, please: share.
Cheers y'all,
diane
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