Whenever I try to explain why ASL is so special to me, I get all flustered trying to come up with words to express how ASL moves me. Even when I couldn’t put together a phrase in sign language, I would sit in amazement of how others could articulate their thoughts without being verbal.
People who…
This… this is why I love you!!! :D
The face of DEAF
Musing upon oppression and what ‘is’ Deaf.
_________________________________
Brilliantly and beautifully stated — if you only watch one VLOG this week, make it this one! You won’t regret the message!
that is the challenge!
i like this!
LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS!
This is a beautiful person we have here!
Also, I recognize at least about 7 of those books. c:
Let’s get on it!
CODA YODA
“Do or do not. There is no try.” Yoda’s famous line … rendered in Coda-Talk.
I know someone that is going to have a major happy when she sees this!
Yesterday, the Huffington Post did a story on a music video that was supposedly done in American Sign Language. The video was done by Mark Nakhla, Greg Faxon And Sam Choi, doing a cover of Kayne West and Jay-Z’s ‘No Church In The Wild’.
Numerous Deaf people, including myself, who are either fluent or native ASL users, upon seeing this video are quite upset. The signing is barely comprehensible to us. It has been described as gibberish and babble. A few ASL signs can be glimpsed in the video, but for the most part, it is utterly incoherent. Mark Nakhla has defended this video by claiming that this video was using ASL glosses and this was an artistic interpretation of the song. He admits he uses some gestures, which is completely different than signs in a signed language. To be irrevocably clear: gestures =! sign. Anyone who would do some basic fact-checking would realize this.
Therefore, this brings up numerous questions. Why did Huffington Post cover a music video that claims to use American Sign Language, but is incomprehensible to fluent and native ASL users? Why didn’t they at least consult with ASL experts to verify that the video does use the language? Why doesn’t Huffington Post cover music videos that are done by Deaf persons, such as Rosa Lee Timm and LankyListman, but only those that are done by hearing people who are extremely poor in using ASL?
And why is it that when we complain about the misrepresentation and exploitation of our language, we’re either ignored or scolded for daring to object?
If an English singer decided to do a song in Spanish or any other language that is spoken with the voice, and they mangled the pronunciation of the foreign words, they would be met with wide-spread criticism, even when given room for ‘artistic interpretation’. And the criticism would be considered as valid and appropriate. Yet this is not the case when it comes to the usage of the Deaf people’s language, American Sign Language.
Why is that?
I can only conclude that there is no sincere respect for signed languages such as American Sign Language, and it is ultimately not considered a real language amongst the mainstream. This is despite decades of scholarly research confirming that indeed, ASL and other signed languages are genuine languages, just like spoken ones.
This is a saddening testimony to how ignored and oppressed the Deaf Community is, in my opinion. Our objections and opinions on issues that concern us, are simply brushed aside as if we do not truly matter.
- http://thedeafedge.org/about/
- A Deaf Pundit (Jeannette Johnson)
What an outstanding job articulating and hitting several key arguments. Click the title-link to head over to her blog for more.
I just finished watching the video, and honestly… it made my eyes hurt. I don’t mean the signing was atrocious (though it was), but the camera moving so much really made it hard for my eyes to focus.
And the “signing” isn’t comprehensible. At all. I even turned on the “captions” (really, the captions are the GLOSS for the song)… and it still doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand where these people got these ideas!! I just don’t see it! And while one of the makers admits to using “gestures”… well, even in their glossing, they seem to have SIGN(gesture) in nearly every sentence. I watch the whole thing through TWICE (once without “captions” and then again with them) and I STILL don’t get it.
I am in NO WAY against hearing people making videos in ASL… but do it RIGHT! If you don’t know how to do something, do NOT make it up. ASK someone!
Can You See What I’m Saying?
I laughed pretty hard at the robber scene.
THIS…. IS AWESOME!!!!
(and accurate, mind you!)
- Attolia in Deaf research paper rant (via hamiathiesgift)
Thesedeafeyes: I’m not entirely sure I agree with this, with the comparison between the deaf child getting a cochlear implant and a hearing child learning a second language. You forgot that while they are learning a new language, they also must learn a new MODE of communication when they get a cochlear implant. It ISN’T just like a hearing child learning Spanish later.
Do I think that all deaf children who get a cochlear later in life will fail? Heavens, no! I know many people that have received implants later in life and done just fine! It will, however, require more work because the brain has already wired itself a specific way. The person now has to re-awaken a part of the brain they have not used so much before. And I think it still works out: if you really want to hear, you’ll do the extra work and go to the classes/therapy for it. If you don’t, then you don’t. Of course, some people get the cochlear implant and are simply just not successful regardless of the work they put in. There’s definitely a bit of chance thrown in as well.
For example: I’m Deaf, but grew up hearing. When I went to Australia, I picked up on Auslan much easier than my hearing classmates because I was already used to the signed mode of communication. THEY picked up on the Australian accent which I struggled with (both copying in my own speech and lipreading theirs). Is it possible? Most definitely! But I’m used to signed languages now as my primary mode of communication. The rest is work. It applies both ways- sign to learning spoken language and spoken to learning a signed language. But I don’t think the correlation between a person knowing a signed language learning a spoken language can necessarily be compared to a person knowing a spoken language learning another spoken language.
(And yes, I know that some people are able to learn visual languages faster and easier than they can learn spoken languages. I’m simply saying a hearing person is probably going to pick up a spoken language easier and faster than a deaf person who is still learning how to hear in the first place.)
Welcome to Linguistics of Accidentally Signed Language (ASL).
We all consume huge amounts of media on a daily basis.
How many times have we run across an uninformed individual holding a particular ASL handshape at a significant spatial-location with a meaningful palm-orientation? Ever watch a movie where someone beautifully combines, movement, handshape, location, palm-orientation, and nonmanual markers into something gorgeously unintended?
Think of this as a space for documenting people whose forehead is very WINDSHIELD-WIPER #9 when it comes to visual language.
Are you ‘F’-to-chin at picking up on such aforemetioned phenomena? Take a snapshot, snip a video clip — add a creative caption and share it with the group.
Turn on your ASL eyes and you’ll notice the ASL-impaired ORANGE-THROAT themselves all the time!
I am legit going to enjoy this! c:
A Gala for all Deaf children
http://gadeaf.org/events/gala/
About Georgia Association of the Deaf
-Established in 1910, the Georgia Association of the Deaf, Inc., “GAD”, is the largest self-help consumer organization of persons with hearing loss in Georgia.
-The main goal of GAD is to bring persons with hearing loss in Georgia together to advocate for equal rights.
-GAD is governed by a Board, which is elected on a biennial basis. Its members support GAD and others interested in furthering GAD’s goals.
-GAD is a state chapter of the National Association of the Deaf.
Why Bilinguals are Smarter
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Published: March 17, 2012
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompea Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).
In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 18, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter.
Button Theme
