Naked Science Forum
General Science => Question of the Week => Topic started by: jamest on 12/04/2024 16:35:52
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Sent in by Walter!
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Since profoundly deaf people receive inputs by signing and lipreading, one must assume that any thought they want to express or derive from an external verbal input will be framed in the language of the signer or speaker, and will correspond with any written text. It can get complicated as there are subtle variants: English, Welsh and American sign language, for instance, are more different than our spoken accents.
A few months ago I saw an extraordinary example of lipreading. A woman who was born deaf was voicing some silent film of British soldiers in World War I, mostly Londoners. That was amazing enough, but at some point she stopped and said "Sorry, I can't make out what these men are saying". The commentator said "They are from the Lancashire Regiment" and she immediately carried on voicing, with a Lancashire accent!
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I have yet to be convinced that we necessarily think in any language.
Have you ever seen a diagram used to explain something?
What language was it written in?
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American sign language, for instance, are more different than our spoken accents.
ASL and BSL are about as different as English and French. It's nothing to do with "accent". The two languages developed entirely independently.
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...which is why I said "more different..."
Apropos diagrams, the Civil Service annual personnel reviews used to score extra marks for foreign language proficiency. During my tenure at a government laboratory my group was visited by a couple of our Austrian equivalents who spoke no English but wanted to replicate some equipment I had designed. We spent a day with machine drawings and circuit diagrams and they departed fully satisfied, so my colleagues amended their personnel records "fluent in all known languages as far as is relevant to the job."
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Hi.
INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. That seems to be the most prevalent official terminology to describe the common way of thinking where your thoughts seem to arise as if they were articulated by some voice inside your head.
Other terminology also exists: Autocommunication; Inner Speech; Intra-personal communication.
With search terms like this, there's a wealth of information (including YT videos, if you don't feel like reading) already on the internet.
However, it's not universal: Some people do not have any such internal monologue. Some people report organising or experiencing their thoughts as something more like pictures or images and sometimes in other ways.
This website seems to claim some authority and has created a short single web-page discussing the internal monologue of deaf people. Warning: That's an external site and it is apparent that they are a commercial enterprise that sell courses and training material in sign language. However, they don't sell mind training and their comments about internal monologue for the deaf shouldn't be too biased.
https://www.lingvano.com/asl/blog/how-deaf-people-think/
Their key phrase is as follows:
If a person was born Deaf and is primarily using sign language as their way to communicate, it?s very likely that this person will also think in sign language.
Best Wishes.