I must admit I have no deep knowledge of stuttering, but I always thought it was a psychological thing. So if you teach someone a sign language, will they continue stuttering? On the same note, are there native sign language speakers who stutter?
I must admit I have no deep knowledge of stuttering, but I always thought it was a psychological thing. So if you teach someone a sign language, will they continue stuttering? On the same note, are there native sign language speakers who stutter?
I suspect they do but don’t know for sure. The reasons I would think they do are because they use a lot of other linguistic concepts almost eerily similarly to the point that when you account for the sensory difference there’s not many differences left. I’ve also seen some fascinating clinical examples (some of them actually from discussing the patients’
speechsign? qualities with the interpreter since that’s part of my assessment).One of the coolest things I ever saw was a patient who signed ASL as a first language and couldn’t write well. So where a hearing person might sound a word out even just silently feeling your lips move, they were fingerspelling off to the side to “feel out” how the words were spelled! It might seem really dumb of me but it really blew my mind to think about at the time.
I forget where I read about this one, but deaf schizophrenics tend to visually hallucinate disembodied signing hands or moving lips, instead of hallucinating auditory voices.
In another case I saw the patient had a lot of weird, wide jerky arm movements that could be really alarming to an unexpecting passerby. We knew the patient was deaf and signed, but we also weren’t certain it was ASL (long story). The interpreter then told us that whether or not the patient was typically able to speak ASL, they were not doing so at that time. I don’t recall if or how they would have checked for any of the other sign languages). But it turned out when they cleared up that they did in fact speak ASL, which means that was sign-salad! Word-salad is a classic symptom of psychosis and is exactly what it sounds like- seemingly random words and syllables just all mashed in together. AND IT HAPPENS IN SIGN LANGUAGE TOO BECAUSE IT’S ALSO A LANGUAGE AND THAT’S FASCINATING!
Also I suspect it would either manifest as shakiness in the hands or something else entirely that isn’t intuitive from a hearing perspective. For instance I found out that to show double letters in fingerspelling you slide, you don’t bounce. I wouldn’t have thought of it that way but it makes sense now that I know I guess.
Anyway I really should go to sleep I work tonight!
Thanks for telling these anecdotes! Sign languages intrigue me, as their modality is so different. But when you actually look at it closer, you see how they’re not really all that different to phonetic languages. It’s mostly the interface that’s different. The concept behind it is the same.
My guess was that teaching a stuttering person a sign language could be a possible solution to overcome that psychological barrier since the way you produce communication is fundamentally different. If the subconscious can’t figure out how to stutter with hands, might it drop it when signing? Anyways, I do think that stuttering for native signers exists, as it seems only natural. I don’t think that phenomena is bound to articulatory-auditory languages. But maybe as a nonnative this might not be so intuitive…