A Town of Sight and Silence

Is this the ultimate in narrowcasting? A planned town of 2,500 designed for the deaf is in the drafting stages, to be built in South Dakota. It will be called Laurent, "after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of deaf people from the 1800s." According to The Guardian, 92 families, from the U.S., England, and Australia, have already signed up and will soon put down deposits for property.

Buildings will incorporate glass for increased visibility, emergency services will rely on lights as opposed to sirens, while shops, restaurants, petrol stations, hotels and schools will be required to use sign language.

Marvin Miller, 33, who conceived the plan, [and who is deaf, told The New York Times], "Society isn't doing that great a job of 'integrating' us" . . .

"My children don't see role models in their lives - mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we're setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society." . . .

Opponents fear that the town will only serve to further isolate deaf people.

You won't have to be deaf to live in Laurent, but you will have to agree to live in a town based on sight and American Sign Language. Sign is a full-fledged language that rewires and reroutes all the brain's linguistic capacities -- deep grammar, meaning recognition -- through the visual system. A fascinating example of "neuroplasticity"! (Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in Seeing Voices, observed that native Signers, when they think to themselves, daydream, or even dream, will move their hands in sketchy Signs just as hearing people move their lips and vocal muscles.) Having informally studied Sign with a friend and a book, I know how hard it is for a hearing person who hasn't grown up with it. It isn't hard to learn to make Signs, of course -- and they are witty and beautiful -- but the speed of visual processing required to understand it was utterly beyond me. My eyes felt slow and stupid -- they felt deaf. (This wonderful website, however, with video demonstration of many signs, makes me feel for the first time like I could learn it.)

Here's a cool, short Cecil Adams "Straight Dope" answer to the question, "What language do deaf people think in?"

Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. . . .

Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it's an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It's not. It's an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese--a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase. . . . Sign can be acquired effortlessly in early childhood--and by anyone, not just the deaf (e.g., hearing children of deaf parents). Those who do so use it as fluently as most Americans speak English. Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge--in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term.

What do you think? If deaf people were increasingly to live in their own communities, like Laurent, would that be a good or a bad thing -- for the deaf, and for the hearing? Wouldn't there be more benefit in routinely teaching Sign to hearing kids in early childhood? Besides making the shared world much more accessible to deaf people, an experiment conducted in Italy suggests that even more than learning a second spoken language, it might make hearing kids smarter and more cognitively versatile:

The hypothesis underlying this experience was that learning a visual-gestural language such as LIS may improve children's attentional abilities, visual discrimination, and spatial memory. . . . tests were administered at the beginning and at the end of the school year to the children attending the [Italian sign language] classes, to children enrolled in the same school but attending an English class, and to children not exposed to a second language. We found that in both studies the [sign language] group performed better than the other groups. These results suggest that learning a sign language may lead to a cognitive advancement in hearing children.

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks described communities on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where there had long been a high rate of hereditary deafness, and therefore just about everyone spoke a sign language -- the hearing were "bilingual" (or linguo-manual?). An impossible dream for the wider world, no doubt, but we could get at least partway there, to the benefit of all.

- amba

Comments

[Tom Strong]

What do you think? If deaf people were increasingly to live in their own communities, like Laurent, would that be a good or a bad thing -- for the deaf, and for the hearing? Wouldn't there be more benefit in routinely teaching Sign to hearing kids in early childhood?

It's interesting to me how politicized this issue has already become, with talk of benefits, multiculturalism, and whatnot. Because on a very basic level, I just think this idea is neat.

Perhaps I'm thinking too much like a tourist (and betraying my lack of understanding of deaf people in the process), but I'd love to visit Laurent once it's established. It sounds like it will be a fascinating, different place. I'll probably feel extremely stupid when I do visit it, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless.