The Deaf culture phenomenon - insights?


Fether
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We had a Deaf member in our ward for a time. I enjoyed a number of conversations with him on this topic while reading his dissertation (about improving education of Deaf individuals) and helping him prepare statistical methods and analyses. It was very much an empathy developing experience for me.

Some of the things I learned from him

Deaf culture is very much a thing. This is because language and culture are intertwined. Their culture affects their language and their language affects their culture. For many living in Deaf culture, receiving cochlear implants is akin to rejecting a part of the culture (I'm not interested in debating if this is rational or fair, especially among adults. I insist, however, in recognizing that it is how many in the Deaf community feel).

Receiving cochlear implants would be somewhat similar to a person in a very strict and orthodox Mennonite community opting to join a less restrictive community that permits the use of light bulbs. It may seem to us outsiders that not much has changed, and that life should now be easier with light bulbs instead of candles--but the original community feels a sense of rejection and loss.

 

In addition to that cultural aspect, Deaf culture is also on very high alert. For most of human history, deafness has been considered a burden and limitation. We've typically spent more time trying to correct and/or ignore the problem than we have addressing it. In the not-so-distant past, we sent deaf kids to "special schools." These weren't really schools, though. They were often more like asylums, hiding an inconvenient problem. In many, sign language was banned, and lip reading was required. Abuse was rampant, frequently unchecked. And because Deaf people were easily dismissed as damaged and unintelligent, their complaints often went unaddressed. Deaf culture views attempts to "normalize" them into the hearing world as a step back toward those more abusive days.

 

Another really important aspect of their hesitancy is developmental. Humans develop a sense of language between 18 and 36 months of age. When I say this, I mean that language is more than just words and grammar. It's the entire sense of building meaning through the use of sounds, gestures, and shared representations. For deaf children, pushing for cochlear implants, or lip reading, or other things that make it easier for non-deaf people to communicate with the child stunts their development of language. If my friends research taught me anything, it was that deaf kids who learn ASL first do better in almost all aspects of life, but especially in language and communication. And it is because, in those developmental months, they are able to develop language, instead of just words.

 

Lastly, and I think this is probably the hardest one for the hearing to understand, is that being able to hear offers very little in the way of improving their quality of life. For a deaf individual, being able to hear doesn't make it easier to communicate; it actually makes it somewhat harder. Remember, ASL is not English. So as soon as you put that implant in, they are bombarded in a foreign language and culture. All of a sudden, subtleties in pronunciation and tone convey a very complex array of meanings that we have spent a lifetime developing and interpreting. On to of that, the feedback loop isn't very good, because implants might make hearing possible, but it doesn't make it perfect. My friend said that, on a good day, he could make sense of about half of what anyone was saying to him. He had to rely on context and visual communication to fill in the rest. In short, the implant didn't make it easier for him to communicate to the hearing, it only made it easier for the hearing to communicate with him.

 

I should probably stop here, but some other minor points might be of interest. Given the inefficiency of implants in adults, it is tempting to think that the earlier you can place an implant, the better. But remember, children need to develop a sense of language before they can learn to communicate concepts effectively. And communicating concepts about how well you can hear and distinguish sounds is a pretty abstract concept. How does one with no hearing background perceive the difference between the 'sh' in should and the 'zh' sound in azure? The more time we make a child focus on what they hear, the less time and energy they will spend on language.

And very importantly, written communication is a poor substitute for the deaf. English is not their primary language. When they try to write and/or read English, they are communicating in their second language.  Asking a deaf person to communicate via writing is like providing a Portuguese interpreter to a Spanish speaker. They will get the gist, but they may miss some of the details.

As an exercise, try imagining a language without articles (the, a, an). How do you communicate the difference between "the cat" and "a cat?" Now, there are lots of spoken languages in the world that do this (many Slavic languages lack articles) and native speakers are quite adept at picking up the difference from context. ASL works the same way. 

 

So anyway, there are a number of cultural influences in the Deaf community that make many of them hesitant toward implants. Some may be more valid than others, but I think it is a big mistake to dismiss those influences simply because we don't understand them. And that may be the biggest contributor to their hesitancy: often, it feels like the hearing don't want to understand the Deaf--they just want the Deaf to be more like the hearing

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