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Five Myths and Facts About American Sign Language

Perhaps one of the least understood aspects of the Deaf experience in the larger hearing world is American Sign Language. The following are five myths I have heard about American Sign Language, with the facts that clear each of them up. Myth: ASL is just English expressed in gestures. People who don’t know ASL frequently think this is the case, most often because their only exposure to ASL is through ASL interpreting, which goes back and forth between English and ASL. In reality, this is no different from translating between English and any other language, such as Spanish or French. Fact: ASL is its own unique language with its own set of vocabulary and grammar rules. Just as with any other language, sometimes English words and ideas don’t translate to ASL, and vice versa. ASL signs have their own meanings separate from English words. They convey ideas. Grammar in ASL is also different. The most common sentence structure in ASL is “topic-comment,” which establishes the subject of...
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Right Ear Advantage

Have you ever found yourself sitting somewhere with something going on to your right and something else going on to your left, leading to a quick internal debate about which you should direct your ears’ attention to? That’s not a cute introductory question to make you want to read this post; it’s the sincere wondering of a girl who has never had that experience. Being profoundly deaf in my right ear, everything my ears (or ear, really) can pay attention to has to be happening on my left. However, that’s (sort of) besides the point. Speaking entirely from reading and research and not at all from experience, I am guessing most of you haven’t had the experience of consciously choosing which side of you gets your auditory attention. Your brain usually does that for you. And my most recent reading and research discovery suggests that your brain is pretty consistent with its choice. It has been known since around 1970s that the right ear is more inclined to process speech than the left, d...
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Stem Cells

In just a few posts, this blog has hopefully established that “curing” hearing loss is far more complex than most people would think. For one thing, there’s the Deaf culture and identity, which views hearing loss not as something to be cured, but as something to be embraced. People who desire to participate in Deaf culture and use sign language as their primary language should be completely free, both of judgment and of regulation, to do so. But even for people who do view hearing loss as a thing to be addressed and fixed, there are complications. Depending on the nature of the loss, amplification might not work. And invasive methods like cochlear implants and bone anchored hearing aids are so new and recently developed that they have many flaws. Developers are constantly working to decrease these flaws and eventually do away with them entirely, but these things take time. While hearing aid and cochlear implant developers work tirelessly to fix their technology, researchers have recen...
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Localization (Part 2)

Although I know it can’t be true given the time frame, I like to think the person who discovered motion parallax did it on a Texas panhandle highway. Since the only objects to look at most of the time are barbed wire fences and cows, the observation is easy to make: the cows that are close to the highway practically fly through the visual field with a “whoosh” sound, appearing to move the opposite direction of the vehicle. The cows far away from the highway seem to stay in the same place forever, or even travel along in the same direction as the vehicle, but at an extremely slow place. I imagine most of us Texas highway frequenters don’t give a lot of thought to the fact that this apparent motion actually serves as a depth cue to tell us how close the cows are to us relative to each other. Even fewer of us would probably think that the motion parallax depth cue also applies to sound localization, but that’s probably because the research is pretty new. The article “Psychophysical eviden...
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Selective Listening

Ever heard of the cocktail party phenomenon (or, if you prefer, the Kool-Aid party phenomenon)? Or maybe you’ve been told that you have a terrible condition called “selective hearing.” The summary of the concept is that people hear what they want to hear better than they hear things that are of no value to them. The cocktail party phenomenon gives, as the name denotes, the example of a person at a cocktail party. That person in the example is totally immersed in a conversation that is of little to no interest to them but is happening in close proximity when suddenly, someone across the room says that person’s name. They say it at a normal volume in the context of the conversation, and it probably should not even be audible, but the person across the room now has the focused auditory attention of the person whose name he or she said. People do things like this all the time, and they are often thought to be rude or nosy for listening in on conversations they were not invited to. Furtherm...
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Localization (Part 1)

Recently, I did an assignment for my sensation and perception class in which I found an article related to a topic of sensation and perception and did a critique of the article. That is, I briefly summarized the study detailed in the article, explained the positive and negative elements of the article and study, and then explained why it was relevant to sensation and perception as a general study. Reading, exploring, and explaining the article led me to think critically about the central question of the assignment: why does it matter? The article “Sound localization in noise by normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant users” addresses the question of whether cochlear implant users can regain any abilities, besides hearing, that are associated with the ears. The main area of concern in this particular article is localization. Before this study, several experiments had been carried out which explored and discussed sound localization and cochlear implants in relation to one another....
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Introduction

Welcome to my blog! I want to start by thanking you for starting out this journey with me, and I hope you will stick around to see where it goes! Before we get into anything technical, I want to introduce this blog. If you're viewing this from a computer, you have probably already seen the text to the left of this post, which summarizes the purpose of this blog. If you are viewing this from a phone, you can click the menu icon in the top left corner to view that text. Please keep this statement of purpose in mind as you explore this blog. I chose to call this blog "The Soundness of Silence" for several reasons, but the one I hope you will keep in mind as you read these posts is this: Every person in the world has his or her own subjective experience. A resulting tendency among individuals is to look on the experiences of other people with a certain degree of judgment and misunderstanding. This is a universal problem, and one small area affected by it is the hearing/de...
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