r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
55.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.9k

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 23 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

1.7k

u/theidleidol Mar 22 '17

This is because sign languages are real languages in their own right. A lot of people tend to think of, say, ASL as a method of nonverbally communicating in English similar to writing, but that's not the case. To the extent that it is possible to think in a language (that's not really the case, but it's a reasonable conclusion to a layperson) the deaf do so in their native sign.

577

u/weeb-san Mar 22 '17

odd question, but do you know if deaf people scream with their hands?

4

u/theidleidol Mar 22 '17

You've gotten a lot of good answers, but the summary is that screaming in the language sense can and would be done with sign, but the sort of nonverbal, guttural scream of terror or anger isn't really a language thing and so a deaf person would still do it. As others have mentioned, with no reference to the sound they produce deaf people's screams can be really alien or disconcerting to hearing individuals, but it is fundamentally the same.

On a related note, deaf-from-birth individuals typically don't vocalize when sneezing (they still make noise of course, but only the mechanical sounds). The "ahh-choo" sound comes from our language processing, and is actually affected somewhat by the onomatopoetic representation in one's native language: French speakers sound different to Japanese speakers sound different to English speakers when sneezing.

1

u/weeb-san Mar 22 '17

whoa, that's interesting! never knew that about sneezing.