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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> The average reading level of deaf 17- and 18-year-olds is at the fourth grade level.

Why??? I would have expected exactly the opposite. Words can open entire worlds. And today as never before a deaf person can communicate with people. The internet is text based as never before in human history.

It can't be because written speech is based on oral. It's certainly possible to learn to read phonetically, but you don't have to. That's what sight words are. I read everything entirely by sight and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

So why?

I would expect someone deaf to read at a blistering pace, and to type equally fast. To the point that they could communicate entirely by typing at almost the same speed as speech.

What assumption am I making that is incorrect, since apparently that's not what actually happens.

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You won't get exposed to language nearly as much as a hearing person. Also, sign languages don't use regular English words, so your vocabulary will not be expanded that much in conversations.

I won't pretend to know about literacy rates among deaf people, but I want to underline jacobr's point here: ASL is not "English with hands" any more than spoken Japanese is "English with different sounds". It's a different language, with different grammar, and different rules. Don't let the "American" throw you off.

They may use familiar words and letters when writing, but you can say the same about many European languages, and as an English speaker figure out some sentences in Spanish or French. Now, you may figure out MORE in written ASL, but it's still different.

Though, if I recall, ASL was based off of a French sign language. That's why adjectives go after the nouns in ASL.

Sign languages are proper languages of their own, and even if they are invented by hearing people, when a deaf community adopts the language it usually diverges quickly from the hearing culture language.

So, you're right that there was a precedent to ASL that came from France but don't assume that ASL is much like French.

English came from French (& German).

(For relaxed definitions of 'French' and 'German')

Yeah, the history of English is waaay more complex than that. But one thing is pretty clear, it isn't a Romance language, and isn't derived from French; it does have a huge French influence, but almost entirely in the form of loan words.

What's interesting is how the upper class words are the french words. This is due to the Norman invasion. So the germanic word "cow" which the farmer deals with gets turned into "beef" for the lord. The lowly germanic "chicken" becomes a french "poultry". A simple germanic "house" is not as grand as a french "mansion" or "manor".

I have a deaf friend who can type a long paragraph with proper capitalization & subordinate clauses, in the time it takes me to hunt and peck a lowercase tweet. But she may not be representative - she comes from an academic/scientist type family and she got a university degree. The average deaf kid may not identify with schooling that much.

Anyway, when we hang out she types these long paragraphs on her Sidekick & I reply with more Hemingwayesque prose on my iPhone. But it doesn't approach the speed of oral or signed speech.

(Related: try reading out the contents of an hour long chat you have with someone over IM; you'll find the whole thing takes just a few minutes.)

I attended RIT, which is also home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. As "captdeaf" (who posted elsewhere in the thread) can probably attest, some deaf students are really bad at written English. The explanation I was given by a deaf guy I knew on IRC was that they were over-exposed to ASL and basically had English as an under-emphasized second language. I think he also pointed out some things about ASL that make English harder, but I don't remember them well enough to reliably repeat here--perhaps someone who is deaf can help me out?

http://redeafined.blogspot.com/2012/04/debunking-fourth-grad...

Short version: the stat is 15y old and mostly measures the unbelievably bad teaching theories (oralism, mainstreaming) that hurt a lot of deaf kids and are still being fought over.

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