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In what language do deaf people think?

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Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#61

Post by pbhjpbhj »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #51
rictic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkable if we can observe these differences directly given our currently rather course scanning mechanisms. That may or may not be what the author was saying though.

Not to nit-pick, intended to help: I think you mean "coarse" rather than "course". After the item here a day or two ago about Garden Path sentences, your comment took me several re-takes to parse correctly.

See, that in itself is interesting to me - that you found it hard to parse that sentence because of a misspelling.

To me it seemed easy to understand: I think the internal process is that as I read I'm speaking internally to myself and so hear¹ the phonic reproduction, homophones don't matter then, the meaning is clear as in that context "rather course" the path/progression/learning-period meaning of course is nonsensical. Also there's probably something in the couplet "rather coarse" being common and there being few words that can follow rather.

I'm pretty good at proof reading but making many homophone (homophonic?) errors in informal writing.

--- ¹ I wrote this as "here", lol.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#62

Post by Groxx »

Groxx wrote: post #48
shasta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it says -4, but I seem to have lost over 30 karma on this comment. Is -4 just the display cap?

I think it is. I've down-voted a couple -4s, but on refresh it still shows -4.

additional thought, after ability to edit had passed:

I wonder if it's to intentionally deflate scores which drop to -4. For particularly bad ones, it'd encourage moderators to downvote.

Not that I particularly think yours is. Must've rubbed a few the wrong way.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#63

Post by nooneelse »

hunterclarke wrote: post #2

Wow that is mind-blowing. I could not possibly imagine a world without words, especially the ones in my head. It goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language.

You can probably get the experience of unworded thoughts if you stop speaking for a few days (or just reduce to very very few words only when necessary). There are religious organizations that do vow-of-silence retreats, or you could go camping alone or with just a couple of other people in a setting in which very little will need to be discussed each day.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#64

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #61
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to nit-pick, intended to help: I think you mean "coarse" rather than "course". After the item here a day or two ago about Garden Path sentences, your comment took me several re-takes to parse correctly.

See, that in itself is interesting to me - that you found it hard to parse that sentence because of a misspelling. To me it seemed easy to understand: I think the internal process is that as I read I'm speaking internally to myself and so hear¹ the phonic reproduction, homophones don't matter then, the meaning is clear as in that context "rather course" the path/progression/learning-period meaning of course is nonsen…

Curious.

I don't read "out loud, but silently" (if you see what I mean). I don't hear the words in my head as I read. I trained myself at age 8 or 9 to read very, very fast by not "sounding out" things in my head. Net result is that I get confused quickly by misspellings. Then I need to backtrack and read things "out loud" while trying not to see what's there.

Which is tricky.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#65

Post by epochwolf »

est wrote: post #37
epochwolf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in written english. For me written english and spoken english are separate languages. I have extreme difficulty translating english words into their spoken equivalents. The reverse is easier only because I have far more practice with it. I have to memorize the spoken words that associate with the sounds. (Part of this may be because written english has a dozen possible sounds for each letter combination) This…

Just curious, are you also a non-native speaker? Or from a Chinese language background?

I'm a native speaker. Born and raised in the United States with American parents.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#66

Post by epochwolf »

todayiamme wrote: post #42
epochwolf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in written english. For me written english and spoken english are separate languages. I have extreme difficulty translating english words into their spoken equivalents. The reverse is easier only because I have far more practice with it. I have to memorize the spoken words that associate with the sounds. (Part of this may be because written english has a dozen possible sounds for each letter combination) This…

I have an analogous problem. I cannot spell words which are spelled differently than the way they are pronounced like resteraunt and other stuff like that. I also have weird quirks with numbers and somehow calculation takes me a long time and I tend to make idiotic mistakes unless I am 100% in the moment (we all do, but these mistakes are different from what other people make. It's the same pattern over and over agai…

> I think that you might have some degree of dyslexia and other co-morbidities.

I don't know if I was clear enough. I only have difficultly converting between spoken and written language. My reading and math skills are fine. I can keep a running total of groceries in my head during a trip to the store.

I do have trouble remembering proper spelling but that's what spell checking for. (OSX 10.6 added automatic spelling correction to TextEdit. I love it!)

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#67

Post by axod »

Jun8 wrote: post #38
ph0rque wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I was 17. I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.

Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)

Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#68

Post by philwelch »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #59
Qz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that English-speaking (and similar languages) people think in a background voice, but rather that we think in meaning and the meaning is echoed back in the mind as English words (or whatever language). For example, there's a lot of times where we will have something that we want to communicate, and we know exactly what it means but not how to say it in words -- often associated with the phrase "something…

>Thisisalsowhyitssomuchahardertounderstandenglishwhenwedon'tputspacesbetweenwords. I've got to say I scanned over that as quickly as the rest of the para and had no problem understanding it. Indeed it's hard not to see the word patterns. This sort of thing gets tricky when you remove the vowels or when there are collisions at word boundaries (expertsexchange, etc.).

Tokenizing provdies btetre erorr corretcion in case words are misspelled. I very highly doubt that tihsprhsaesicmorephesnilbe.

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#69

Post by Jun8 »

axod wrote: post #67
Jun8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)

Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.

At least some has to be in a linguistic representation (check the Aydede article I linked above, it's interesting). Why? Because (i) You cannot represent everything using images, e.g. "brother", "justice", "tesseract", but more importantly (ii) it is impossible for image representations to support complex syntactic manipulations necessary for reasoning. As a very simple example, think about the syllogism that starts with "all men are mortal". How would you convert the deduction to a representation based on images.

One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters had this characteristic).

Re: In what language do deaf people think?

#70

Post by philwelch »

axod wrote: post #67
Jun8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)

Why do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.

Christ, I couldn't. I'm terrible at visualization and many of my abstract thoughts cannot be visualized.
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