Gestures are another vector in the hand-tongue highway. They are so interesting and I looked into it in a Cog Sci class. My writeup was so subpar compared to the research I did. I need to get back into it. Ended up being my favorite class as there was so much I did not know.
"“Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language. This is quite interesting, since blind speakers cannot be learning these language-specific gestures by watching other speakers gesture,” [1]
Similar article [2]
A more 'official' paper: "People use gestures when they talk, but is this behaviour learned from watching others move their hands when talking? Individuals who are blind from birth never see such gestures and so have no model for gesturing. But here we show that congenitally blind speakers gesture despite their lack of a visual model, even when they speak to a blind listener. Gestures therefore require neither a model nor an observant partner." [3]
There are a lot of dance styles in India where gestures (hand/face/leg) are the principal means of story communication.
The most common these days is a "tactile" approach where one person uses sign language and the deaf-blind person holds their hands to "listen". There's research going on to make American Sign Language more streamlined to support this sort of interaction, but while that's doing on, in the US at least, it's common to have people just sign ASL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GrK3P15TYU
Blindness is a spectrum though so it's possible that some deaf-blind people will have some sort of ability to see (usually takes the form of tunnel vision). In that case, they can still communicate similar to deaf individuals but it's usually modified so that the hands remain much much closer to the face (stay within view of what they can see).
1. We are born with the ability to gesture, and not something that is learned directly. So it is a in-born trait. You get the ability of speech, and gesturing tags along. (but most likely, evolutionary speaking, gesturing came first).
2. Gesturing is linked to speech/language. Different languages will have different gestures, not because they learned them, but by the grammatical structure/intonation of the language.
It will have been interesting to see multi-lingual people, and see if the level of gesturing changes when they switch language.
"The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers."
Sure if you believe it. We also don't speak to each other to cater to people who are deaf, and we don't use sign language to cater to people who are blind.
I must have expressed it poorly, because my conjecture seems to apply equally to blind people. Looking back, maybe it's because I wrote "see and hear"? Just an artifact of my perspective as a hard-of-hearing person who relies heavily on lipreading. I suspect when blind people hear speech, or read with braille, they mirror the muscle movements involved, as if they were speaking the words themselves. Sight isn't required for that. Neither is hearing. The deaf-blind can learn sign language through feeling the motion of the signs. I suspect it all works the same way, hearing language, seeing language, feeling language acted out physically - the audience understands it by acting out the same motions themselves, internally.
> Facial expressions, body language, and eye contact are the bones of communication and it’s quite difficult to build and maintain relationships without the ability to read them.
As a blind person this was quite difficult to read (emotionally). I don't have any additional mental needs, but for obvious reasons I'm unable to read other peoples' visual body language, maintain eye contact or gauge their facial expressions. And because I can't do those things, and have never been able to do those things, they don't always come naturally to me either. I have a habbit of appearing to have a very serious expression on my face when actually I feel quite light and carefree, for instance. Maybe great in a poker game, I don't know.
As an example of this, I never learned to nod or shake my head in response to questions until a recent trip to visit my partner in Mexico. Her sister is hearing-impaired, and so gestures like those were often the simplest way to communicate meaning. My partner, who is also blind, has grown up using those gestures because of her sister, but for me it was like learning something new.
The article mentions some possible advantages of speech over gestures:
(1) Abstractness (which it debunks, I think successfully).
(2) Better in the dark.
(3) Frees the hands.
(4) Energy usage.
There are some others I can think of, too:
(5) Not only does it free the hands of the speaker, it frees the eyes of the listener. I can only look in one direction at a time. If you're trying to communicate to me about a task I'm doing which involves looking at something, with gestures I need to shift my gaze to you and then back to what I'm doing. This makes real-time coordination of physical tasks difficult.
(6) Distance. If two people are far apart (say, 100 meters), they can shout and be understood. With gestures, that could be possible but only if they involve large movements. Verbal communication can be scaled to large distances with a more straightforward modification.
(7) Vision problems are more prevalent and strike at a younger age than hearing problems. What percentage of otherwise-healthy 35 year old people have myopia vs. have hearing loss?
This reminds of how Helen Keller learned to communicate. The technique is called Tadoma[0].
> Tadoma is a method of communication used by deafblind individuals, in which the deafblind person places their little finger on the speaker's lips and their fingers along the jawline. The middle three fingers often fall along the speaker's cheeks with the little finger picking up the vibrations of the speaker's throat.
No, of course not :). I was thinking more along the lines of a deaf-mute person being able to give a presentation or hold a lecture for people that do not understand sign language.
I read your post with extreme interest and came to a better understanding about being deaf. Thank you for that.
I have a few questions. Can you sign? Can you read lips? Can you pronounce words? The reason I ask is I once had a deaf friend. He didn't sign, or at least didn't try to with people that didn't know ASL, but he could read lips. He could read lips so well that he could tell if you were just mouthing a word or actually saying it out loud. He would often admonish us if we simply mouthed a word to him. :) It got to the point where the only impediment to ongoing conversations with him, was that he had to be looking at you. He was so good at reading lips that he would often pickup parts of conversations he wasn't a part of ( like "overhearing" one ). If he wanted to know what was going on, he simply had to look in people's direction and read their lips.
It was awkward for the first day or two. Him looking right at you, you getting over mouthing words to him, him replying to you in the tone that only a person who can't hear their own words would. To me, it was no different than learning to speak with a foreigner but the added benefit was that we seemed to pick it up after no more than a week of solid talking, laughing, mocking, and understanding. I seem to recall him telling me to shutup on more than one occasion. Coming out of his mouth, it sounded more like "shauuuuup" with no real emphasis on the T or the P, but I knew what he meant.
I don't profess to know whether or not he's gone through the same loneliness as you, but it seems that he found a way to be a part of "normal" that worked for him and for the people around him. Does this mean I wouldn't have learned sign language? No. This also wasn't a work environment and it predates any technological "advancements" that may be at your disposal now.
As an embodied cognition guy, I disagree here pretty strongly. Gestures are a powerful form of communication - consider deaf signers, scuba divers, even in time sensitive operations like military and sports. Gestures likely have a deeper evolutionary history than spoken language too. They are intuitive. Babies mimic long before they speak or manipulate.
I expect not, because I’m not aware of any “Blind culture” equivalent to “Deaf culture”. There’s no unique language for blind people, for example - they speak whatever their family speaks.
> remember that deaf-blind people exist [... ...] able to understand language
I got curious if/how deafblind people learn to communicate in the first place, if they are completely deafblind from birth. If humans can learn not just communication but language without either vision or hearing, that seems to suggest either extreme adaptability or language learning being quite decoupled from vision and hearing. From an evolutionary standpoint, I imagine that both deafness and blindness are probably uncommon enough that language learning could have explicit dependencies on both hearing and vision.
I found an old-looking video about communication with deafblind people. At the linked timestamp is a woman who is deafblind since age 2.
I'm not deaf and/or use sign language, but I have modes where I prefer speaking rather than written text. I would presume deaf people would be the same for their more personal and expressive communication.
Something I've wondered... when politicians give speeches they often have some hand gesturing from a sign language interpreter standing next to them. But I've never understood why this is better than subtitles. If you're deaf then wouldn't you rather read text than follow sign language?
Yes they are. However, is a blind, deaf, person with absolutely no motor control, no sense of touch, and no proprioception intelligent? Unclear. They certainly have no language faculties.
"A second supposed advantage is that speech is better in the dark – that, as Levelt put it, gesture is ‘functionally dead during, on average, 12 hours a day’. This is probably overstated. As Emmorey points out, modern signers get by without much problem, even in dim lighting, and can use tactile forms of signing – that is, signing in contact with another’s skin – in a pinch. Our prehistoric ancestors likely didn’t spend many waking hours in pitch-black. Rather, they would have used fires for warmth, cooking, illumination and protection from predators. And, whether or not there’s anything to Hewes’s palmar depigmentation story, hand movements can certainly be seen by firelight.
"Another advantage of speech, it has been argued, is that it frees the hands for other activities. But, here again, this is likely too swift. Signers don’t seem to have much of a problem with this, using one-handed signs when necessary. And though most of what we think of as gesture takes place in the hands, critical visual signals can also be produced with the head and face – pointing, affirming, questioning. The list of putative advantages of speech goes still further. But this kind of ‘rear-view mirror’ reasoning is inherently shaky: we know the outcome and are motivated to explain it."
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