My 14-year-old daughter asked me what language people who are deaf from birth think in. Does anybody know how this cognitive feature develops in deaf people?
• It varies. Deaf and hearing children raised by deaf parents who use sign language will acquire that language in a similar way to the acquisition of speech by hearing children. They will use this language to think with just as any other child will.
However, most deaf children are born to hearing parents who cannot sign, and they will not develop language in the same way. These children often use gestures for basic communication but this is not the same as sign language, and their first exposure to an accessible language may be at school, or later, and this is clearly disadvantageous.
Advertisement
Language is crucial to cognitive development, but what language is used and which modality it is in really doesn’t matter.
Rachel Mapson, Edinburgh, UK
• The idea that thoughts necessarily come in the form of words seems to have a hard time dying. This misconception appears to be especially common in the English-speaking world, perhaps because most people there are monolingual.
As a polyglot, I can assure you that I don’t think in words. I am capable of relating the contents of an article or TV documentary without remembering what language I originally read or saw it in. To me this is proof that the information was not stored in my brain in the form of words.
Even a monolingual person should be aware that relating the contents of an article or discussion is easy, while remembering the exact words might be practically impossible; further evidence that we don’t store information as words, but rather as abstract thoughts.
Thoughts only get put into words, or signs, when you want to communicate them or when thinking about communicating them, in which case you might indeed think in words for a while.
Frank Siegrist, Lausanne, Switzerland
The role of language in the formation of thought is still a matter of debate. See 91av, 28 May 2011, p 40 – Ed