Our language is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other mammals in particular and other animals in general. A lot of you guys agreed with me on this in your comments on the Neanderthal articles. Not only does it allow us to express and communicate complex thoughts, language socially unites communities and countries together, connecting individuals who speak the same language much in the way a same hometown or birth country does. In other words, language allows us many of our identities, and plays a large part in shaping us into the unique social humans that we are. The same is true even for languages that are not spoken, as Sara Petersen, a Sign-language teacher at a Minnesota elementary school, realized. In the article "Teacher 'jazzed' by work with hearing-impaired students" by Joanna Miller, Petersen comments that the more deaf children "know about themselves and what’s different about them, the more they can do to help themselves.” This, according to Petersen, is achieved by teaching them Sign language and surrounding them with deaf peers, so they “would not have to go through an adult for everything they need to talk about," and have the communications tool to build for themselves "a better self image.” Even for deaf people, then, language helps create a deaf culture to unite individuals.
If language's paramount importance in communicating and uniting "normal" folks holds true as well for deaf folks, I can't help but wonder if the same is also true with language's role in shaping thought. As we discussed in class, humans think not only in spoken language, but also in images and with other senses. What if these visual images ARE the language, as is the case for the "profoundly and prelingually deaf"? People who have acquired language before they became deaf, as Cecil Adams says in his 2003 Straight-Dope article "In what language do deaf people think?", have a problem "not minor, but manageable." They think with the language they once spoke, much like normal humans do, and may learn Sign only in order to communicate. People who were deaf at birth or became deaf before they acquired language, however, need Sign not only to communicate, associate and form identities, but in order to do the very act of thinking itself. How different is the role of images for them, then, if most sign languages use the hands to create images in order to communicate? Are the images of Sign distinguished from other images in their thoughts, or are they treated the same way?
A native deaf signer reported to have been asked the question "How do you think?" many times. Here is her answer, which I find fascinating: she sees her mouth forming words or herself signing words in her head, and she sometimes also hears the "little voice in the back of the head" that all of us do when we think, even though she has no idea what it's like to hear a voice. She herself has no idea how this is possible, though she guesses she may have an idea of how words should sound through experiences with speech therapy. This brings up yet another interesting question: how does the way a deaf person thinks changes when he begins learning another spoken language in addition to Sign (in this case, English)? How about the difference between learning English in comparison to Sign, as opposed to learning Sign after speaking English, if the natively deaf are biologically different from those who became deaf after spoken-language acquisition?
Extremely random side note(s):
In trying to decide whether language shape thought, I attempted to define thought, and realized that we humans define great thought in context of culture. We might or might not need language to perceive or appreciate, but we need it in order to formulate our thoughts, compare it to those of others, and build upon them. We need it to develop our intellectual potentials and achieve thought maturity, as least as it is defined in our cultural context as knowledge, wisdom, and well-supported opinions. What do you guys think thought is?
What about memories? I'm not sure how everyone else is, but I typically analyze in words and remember in images; my thoughts are usually in words, and my recalled memories are mostly visual. I say mostly, because I'm unsure where to draw the line between memories and thoughts, as memory leads new thoughts as often as it does other memories, and the switch back and forth is usually unnoticeable. Should we simply consider memory a form of thought, then?
Sources aside from articles mentioned above:
Happy reading, and have a great weekend! =]
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1 comment:
Nice post, you raise some great questions about the relationship between signed language, spoken language, and "thought". Feel free to speculate about possible answers to some of these questions!
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