Query from a colleague

[twflynn at AOL.COM]

When I taught reading to Deaf college students eight or ten years ago, I explained to them that non-Deaf people have a little voice in their head - or at least I had one - and when I read, I could sort of 'hear' that voice in my head speaking the sentences I was reading. I asked them what went on in their heads when they were reading - did they 'see' hands signing or what. Three of them told me that the words on the pge made pictures in their heads (as long as they understood the words)  - one guy said something like, "If I see d-o-g, I see a dog in my head, and then if I see r-u-n, then I see the dog running." 

It's not my intuition, and it sure don't count as research, but it might be something of a start. 

BTW, I did have one Deaf student who signed while he read - he threw a sign for every word he said, so it sure wasn't ASL, and based on his responses about the readings, I don't think he understood them even decently - sometimes not at all. So I'd say that signing along with the text - be it on the hands or in the head - didn't help with decoding the text, but it could be that what he was doing physically was just an exhibition/demonstration of what was going on in his head - like reading aloud only signing aloud. I dunno. 






-----Original Message-----
From: Fischer Susan <susan.fischer at RIT.EDU>
To: SLLING-L <SLLING-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACC.EDU>
Sent: Thu, Feb 24, 2011 3:34 pm
Subject: Query from a colleague


A non-sign linguist asks for citations or intuitions about how signers talk to themselves in their heads. For example, do they visualize themselves or someone else?  Do they see their hands from their normal perspective?  My own initial reaction would be that there's some subliminal manual (or other) tension that could be measured much as lips show some tension when users of spoken language talk to themselves.  Might there be individual variation? (such variation is under-studied in the case of spoken language).  I will be happy to post a summary of responses.


Susan D. Fischer
Susan.Fischer at rit.edu


Center for Research on Language
UCSD







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