A city where sign language is the primary language.

Soz, the ability for language is innate, but it will not develop unless there is a community of potential users. A single deaf child will not spontaniously create a language. Language is a social process which is why it is easier to to teach a large number of chilren ASL than a small group.

I may be over (hyper?) sensitive here but I distrust segregatin however well intentioned.

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"A Deaf child growing up in an all-hearing but all fluently signing environment will do just as well as a Deaf child growing up in an all-Deaf and all fluently signing environment."

This is key to me, that there would be a fluent signing environment with hearing also around. I think it unlikely and probably undesireable that Laurent would be populated with only people who had no hearing at all. Even if planned that way, and I gather it isn't, I don't think it would turn out that way. But to have the town foster signing seems neat to me.

I have a bias. I am a mess in three senses. I don't have much of a sense of smell - cannot detect gas, for example, or perfumes; have well-documented-on-a2k fragile eyesight, and have substantial and growing hearing loss, and thus can imagine being envious of those who can see signage, though I hasten to add my vision is perking along right now. This is all rather contained and slow, and I may be 125 before a denouement of helplessness occurs, but it fuels my interest past that of a general interest as a city planning professional.

So, I happen to like cities, mostly, more than many people, but I am interested in concept in areas of cocooning within any given city or in a town such as Laurent, not particularly for me, as I am older, but for future people. Not isolation zones, but comfort zones.

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Acquiunk wrote:

As for the community for deaf people only, I think that isolation, for what ever reason is in the long term counter productive. If for no other reason than that it allows the hearing community to solve it's "problem" by suggesting to deaf people that that is really where they want to be, whether they do or not.

Actually, I like this spirit of "We don't like the way society treats us -- let's start up a new society!" I also like the fact that once the new community is started up, the question of what's better is decided experimentally rather than through philosophical musings about 'integration' vs. 'isolation'. If Deaf people think the integrated society offers them a better deal, more Deaf people will on net migrate out of the Laurent and into the rest of society. If they think it offers them a worse deal, there will be net immigration into Laurent. Whatever the experimental answer turns out to be, I think the experiment is a very elegant approach to the question.

Question to Sozobe: It seems to me that the American press has been printing a lot of articles on Cochlear implants and other Deaf community issues over the past few weeks. In particular, besides the article which started this thread, the Wall Street Journal just had a long, long, article on cochlear implants with lots of 'converted skeptic' type anecdotes. It does spend a few paragraphs' on describing the other side's point of view, but the following excerpt captures the overall tone well.

The Wall Street Journal wrote:

So-called cochlear implants -- electronic devices surgically placed in the bone behind the ear -- have been around for two decades. But it was only five years ago that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the devices for use in children as young as 12 months. Now a new generation of children is entering deaf schools with the hope that they may someday hear and speak almost as naturally as those without hearing problems.

As this happens, it is reshaping a longstanding battle over how deaf children should be educated. Supporters of the venerable culture built up by deaf people believe deaf children should get a strong grounding in American Sign Language so they can participate fully in that culture when they grow up. But others -- including some deaf kids' parents who can hear -- want more emphasis on hearing and speaking English to prepare the children for life in the mainstream world. Now the implants are boosting their cause. More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.

Some steeped in deaf culture don't see themselves as handicapped and view implants as an attempt to "fix" something that isn't broken. They especially oppose hearing parents deciding to get implants for their deaf children, believing kids should make the decision themselves when they get older. "This is a major intervention, and the ethics of operating on a healthy child can be questioned," says Harlan Lane, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston who has written many books about the deaf community.

Research shows, however, that the implants work best when given to very young children, who develop language more quickly than adults. The implants don't create a perfect replica of the sound that hearing people hear, but recent models come fairly close. If a child of 3 or 4 gets an implant, a few years of training is often enough to make up for lost time and enable the child to blossom in hearing society.

Full Article (Subscribers only)

Do you know the reason for this recent increase in coverage? Is there an important piece of legislation coming up in Congress or something?

EDIT: On reading the whole thread, I have another question for you, using this remark as a starting point:

Sozobe wrote:

They have one language which is easily accessible (and a true language -- ASL), and then another one which is accessible only in written form (English).

Speaking as someone who has been in discussions like this before (and enjoyed every one of it) I notice that this point about ASL being a "true language" comes up frequently, and it always leaves me a little bit bemused. Why should Deaf people care what linguist deem a "true" language, any more than birds care what ornithologists deem a "true bird"? As long as Deaf people prefer that mode of communication, why should the linguists' opinion make any difference to them?

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Acquiunk wrote:

I may be over (hyper?) sensitive here but I distrust segregatin however well intentioned.

Do you see any interesting difference between segregation and self-selection? I share your distrust for people in power who say: "Let's confine citizens of class X to ghettoes, where they belong." That's segregation, and it sucks, even if the people who make the decision think they're making it for noble reasons. But when the members of class X decide for themselves: "Screw this, we're opting out and doing our own thing!" -- that's different, is it not? My friends and I did something similar as a particular minority within our clique system in high school (classical music and math nerds). It's not the perfect analogy to the subject of this thread, but still, judging by my experience, I can only recommend it. Do you still distrust it under this latter scenario?

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Hi Thomas!

I bring up the true language thing kinda automatically, because so often -- still -- ASL is seen as a sort of second-rate mimicry system. For example, superjuly said on the previous page, "So... sign language is technically mimicking and associating the 'word' with a sound is not part of it." Lots of people (and this is no dig at superjuly -- LOTS of people) think that ASL is all iconic and gestural, without the many arbitrary signs and grammar and all the other stuff YOU have seen me say a thousand times. ;-)

C.I. coverage comes and goes in waves. It's interesting, has conflict and drama and can even be passed off as topical with the continuing advances made in the field. If there is a spate now, I'd tend to put it down to the Laurent coverage -- same core issues, Deaf culture + ASL vs. making a deaf person "hearing" -- and just regular news cycle, "hey it's been a while..."

From your article, note it's all "hope" and "a few years of training is often." There are success stories -- and there are failures. Lots and lots of failures. Meanwhile, "a few years of training" is extremely intense, and ongoing, just that it usually takes a few years before benefits really start to show, IF there will be benefits. A few years of intense training usually means that with all of that intensity, other training opportunities do not take place -- like learning ASL -- and that if in the end it doesn't work (a frequent occurrence), those years are pretty much lost.

Awful high stakes.

Acquiunk, yes, I was making exactly the same point about the importance of exposure to language. In parentheses, I mentioned an idea I was rebutting -- you seemed to think it was an expression of my own thinking.

I very much agree with Thomas and Osso that there has to be a qualitative difference between forced segregation and voluntary cocooning (of, again, a tiny percentage of the population). I loved Osso's line about not isolation zones, but comfort zones.

I really do understand the reflexive resistance to separation/ segregation, Acquiunk, but I think it's just that, reflexive. I don't think it stands up to careful consideration in this particular unique case, with disability and language so deeply intertwined.

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sozobe wrote:

Lots of people (and this is no dig at superjuly -- LOTS of people) think that ASL is all iconic and gestural, without the many arbitrary signs and grammar and all the other stuff YOU have seen me say a thousand times. ;-)

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was after. My intended point was this: Even if linguists didn't consider ASL a "real language", even if it was all iconic and gestural to them -- it still is the deaf people's decision, not the linguists' decision, what language to speak. Even if the deaf chose it out of sheer stubbornness, they would still have a right to have this choice respected. So, as an outsider to Deaf culture, I can't help wondering: Why bother with this red herring of real-language-dom?

I'm trying to come up with an anology, can't find a real good one, but for what it's worth: Up until the mid 20th century, state-of-the art sports medicine considered it scientifically proven that a woman's body cannot handle long distance running. For this reason, until 1968, 1500 meters was the longest running event for women in the Olympics. Marathon organizers in Boston and elsewhere didn't just refuse to let women participate -- they even had the police pull out any stealth woman participants who might sneak their way into the races (often with fake, unisex names such as "Bobby Smith").

By the account of Runner's World, the main argument of feminist activists at the time wasn't that science was wrong. Some did make that argument too -- mysteriously, the bodies of Swedish women had no problem handling 50 km races in cross-country skiing -- but the main argument was that it was their, the women's bodies, which they were training and maybe overtraining; even if the sports medicine literature was right, that didn't give doctors and biophysicists a veto over how far a woman may officially run.

I feel that this was the right response, and I wonder why the Deaf community doesn't seem to prefer a similar line of responding.

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Well, because so much of the debate is framed in terms of what is best for children. It is important for a child to be exposed to a real language for many, many reasons, most fundamentally for developing cognition. As in, if someone has not been exposed to language -- a real language -- that person not only has problems communicating, but has more general cognition problems.

So "even if it's not a real language, it doesn't matter" doesn't really cut it. If that "point" is conceded, that alone is enough to give considerable ammo to people who think an ASL environment is not best for a child. If it's not a real language, that is pretty empirically demonstrably a bad environment for kids.

So that's not a point we want to concede, especially as it happens to be true that ASL is a real language.

As in, if that's a point we concede, Deaf institutes will be shut down, Deaf charter schools will lose their funding, and all sorts of devastating real-life consequences would ensue.

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I haven't read this thread all the way through but I must say I sort of fancy a society where if I didn't feel like talking I could just my hands in my pockets.

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sozobe wrote:

Well, because so much of the debate is framed in terms of what is best for children. It is important for a child to be exposed to a real language for many, many reasons, most fundamentally for developing cognition.

Alright -- that was the connection I wasn't getting. Everything else follows naturally from there. Thanks!

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So, I just checked my emails and found an archnewsnowcom update with the Laurent-KHB site Soz gave earlier. The woman who does that site also included this article -

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050327/NEWS/503270323/1001

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ossobuco wrote:

So, I just checked my emails and found an archnewsnowcom update with the Laurent-KHB site Soz gave earlier. The woman who does that site also included this article -

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050327/NEWS/503270323/1001

Sounds very cool! If this is supposed to be a success, they need to make it look less attractive to hearing non-signers like myself.

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Thomas wrote:

Do you see any interesting difference between segregation and self-selection?

Not really, I have little use for gated communities either. Any thinking that draws or forces people into isolated communities in the long run (and it is generally not very long) brakes down the attachment to the larger society and the sense of community and responsibility for that community weakens.

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I agree with aquiunk on that. <Oh, no, my agreement is being attacked by ants...>

but I don't think this particular community will be so much isolated as fostering a kind of communication that has a lot of obstacles in some other places, while also having hearing folks. I saw statistics earlier on this thread re hearing parents and deaf children that seem to bear my point out.

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Let me ask you a different question, Acquiunk. Can you think of any other population that has evivalent language issues?

Specifically, where the majority language is simply inaccessible, period. Permanently.

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By the way while I obviously have strong opinions about the underlying issues, I don't know too terribly much about the specifics of this town, how things will work. Lots of interesting questions, I think.

One that occurs to me has to do with the fact that the Deaf community is very familial. I am certain but certain that there will be major personality conflicts -- not anything that would require a policeman, but that could nonetheless make life in Laurent extremely unpleasant. I wonder how they will handle that?

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Did you read the argus link, Soz? Not that it answers your specific points, but it was helpful to me (who has done street design to slow traffic not all so long ago, say two years.)

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Acquiunk wrote:

Thomas wrote:

Do you see any interesting difference between segregation and self-selection?

Not really, I have little use for gated communities either. Any thinking that draws or forces people into isolated communities in the long run (and it is generally not very long) brakes down the attachment to the larger society and the sense of community and responsibility for that community weakens.

Aren't you confusing cause and effect here? Two Deaf people picked at random will feel a distinctly stronger sense of community and responsibility for each other than a Deaf and a hearing person picked at random, other things being equal. (Is that fair to say, Soz?) That's the cause here, and the reasons for that cause are none of our business. The effect is that some Deaf people are now starting up their own town. There may well be a hen-and-egg-ness to what's cause and what's effect here, but I think we disagree on what the dominant direction of causation is.

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I did read the argus link, thanks osso. It's interesting, provided some extra info. (Most of my info has come from the Laurent website itself, which I was pointed to via PM a while back by a very sweet A2Ker who seems shy about it somehow so I won't say who.)

One of the other major battlegrounds I can imagine -- the school. There are many competing educational philosophies and there is no way to fit them all in one school (many are diametrically opposed to each other -- "total communication" vs. "ASL only", for example.) As soon as one philosophy is chosen, a whole swath of potential residents will be turned off.

Man, not sure I envy Mr. Miller.

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sozobe wrote:

Let me ask you a different question, Acquiunk. Can you think of any other population that has evivalent language issues?

Specifically, where the majority language is simply inaccessible, period. Permanently.

I can think of a number of populations that have equivalent language issues. Canada and Belgium come immediately to mind.

No language is inaccessible, all human are capable of learning any language, if they want to take the time and effort (and that is the problemtime, effort and desire)

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No, Acquiunk. An English-speaking person can learn French. A French-speaking person can learn English.

A profoundly Deaf person can not "learn" spoken English in the same way. Period.

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A city where sign language is the primary language.

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