A question about sign language.

April 9, 2006 5:52 PM

A question for those familiar with American Sign Language (or other signed languages): When hearing speakers are surprised or shocked or wish to indicate they have just said something they shouldn't they often clap their hands over their mouth. This is usually immediate and seems almost involuntary. Is there something similar used by deaf signers or do they tend to use the same gesture hearing people do?

The meaning of the hand over the mouth seems pretty clear. But I wouldn't think that deaf signers associate the mouth with communication in the same way and I am wondering if they do something different to communicate the same idea.

posted by LeeJay to writing & language (9 comments total)

I don't think shaking your head from side to side means "I don't want to hear you" It just means "no". I always figured it came from babies who don't want to eat a particular thing.
posted by delmoi at 6:27 PM on April 9, 2006

My dad's deaf and he claps his hands over his mouth, but only in an exaggerated, "I'm so bad" type of way.
posted by amarynth at 6:36 PM on April 9, 2006

The deaf know that language primarily comes from the mouth. Your question seems similar to the issue of whether blind people are offended by the phrase "I see your point".

I probably didn't word my question clearly enough since I really didn't mean "I wouldn't think that deaf signers associate the mouth with communication in the same way" in quite the way you took it. I assume that most deaf people know that language, for the majority of people, primarily comes from the mouth. What I meant had more to do with the nearly involuntary nature of the gesture. In other words the hand comes over the mouth without thinking to, in a sense, stop the words from coming out.

I guess part of what I am wondering is if someone who does the bulk of their communicating with their hands, and has since birth (since I am thinking mostly of folks who were deaf from birth and learned signed language as their first language) and unconciously associates communication with hand gestures instead of the mouth would use such a gesture with other deaf people or if there is another sort of gesture used when among other signers to communicate the same thing.

Although your point about it being a social convention makes much sense.
posted by LeeJay at 6:42 PM on April 9, 2006

Sidetrack: even to respond to delmoi's usual inane comment:

shaking your head from side to side means ... I always figured it came from babies who don't want to eat a particular thing.

I noticed my first infant son would always l-r shake his head when pissing into his diaper. I presumed that this behavior was innate and that the piss connection is why the l-r shake means "no". Since then I've found some cultures in which l-r means yes but they are very few.

posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 7:01 PM on April 9, 2006

However clapping your hands over your ears, sticking your tounge out, closing your eyes, and shaking your head side to side - is a convention (to mean "I don't want to hear you")

The deaf can do this much more elegantly, by simply diverting there gaze. Especially when facing straight at you and looking up and to the side. Ouch.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:05 PM on April 9, 2006

someone who does the bulk of their communicating with their hands

Part of the answer is that the deaf don't always do the bulk of their communicating with their hands. Even when using sign, deaf people are increasingly also using 'total communication', which involves the same types of communication you and I also engage in -- watching the listener's facial expression, making expressions yourself (like rolling eyes, looking shocked, etc), using body language, making eye contact, vocalizing, shrugging, laughing, etc. Deaf people use their entire bodies and faces, perhaps more than we do, to get communication across.
posted by Miko at 8:40 PM on April 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

In the same way that deaf people learn, say, ASL as their first language if they’re born deaf, they learn all the other, oft overlooked components of communication. So, a deaf person learns that certain hand gestures mean certain things, that certain syntactical conventions govern what it would mean if they made certain hand gestures in a certain order, and that you should smile when something amuses you. The hand-over-the-mouth thing isn’t an artifact of having grown up speaking and hearing as “the way” to communicate with other people; it’s an artifact of growing up with the capacity for seeing hand gestures—whether the gestures are ASL or flicking someone off or some symbology you and your friend made up meanings and grammar/usage guidelines for but no one else understands—and for learning where they ‘fit’ in whatever system of signs and symbols that (a) you understand, and (b) whomever you want to convey some message to understands, too.

Hand-over-mouth is something people learn, just as with smiling or spitting or etc., through having been socialized to ‘know’. You can instinctively settle upon certain words (or certain gestures, as with ASL) and instinctively arrange them and conjugate them so they ‘sound right’ to you, and so they modify each other in a way that captures the thought or information you want someone else to understand or know or etc. You ‘know’, after you’ve been socialized enough to see things from a certain cultural perspective (i.e., so that you have certain beliefs, values, norms and knowledge, so that you behave in a certain way when in a given circumstance {propping a door open after you’ve passed through, so that friends, or even strangers in most cases, won’t have to open the door for themselves, e.g.}, and so that, instinctively, you propagate tying your tie in a certain way, or preparing and baking some holiday dish in a certain way, or propagate some other example of what sociologists call ‘cultural artifacts’.), that if you put this-or-that bunch of words together in this-or-that particular pattern, then this type of person, or that particular Joe Schmo, will, for example, decode the audible and visual cues you’ve strung together for the occasion and be left with “so-and-so understands the object he and I are discussing as being like ‘X’ or a kind of ‘Y’, and is incredulous about the properties that characteristic ‘T’ of the object he and I are jawing about appears to have on account of experiences he has had that indicate to him that the properties characteristic ‘T’ seems to have are deleterious enough to each other that characteristic ‘T’ isn’t what we thought it was.”
posted by Yeomans at 12:07 AM on April 10, 2006

My comments are just from observation -- former in-laws (both deaf) used to throw their hands up (like "no, no" or "hold on") and then start again but also, like Miko said, with the total communication thing, their eyebrows and mouths would scrunch up and my ex-mom-in-law would sometimes add a "wooooooo". But that was when they were talking with me (me hearing) and I can't say I ever remember seeing anything when they were just talking with other deaf people. There's the whole staring at their hands thing when trying to fingerspell a particularly lengthy English word and slowing it down to get it right. This doesn't help you out at all, I fear. I will say this fascinating thing my ex-husband noticed -- we both used to drive a bus at a school for the deaf and this kid, a preschooler, was always talking to him. His signing wasn't completely comprehensible yet, the way hearing preschoolers aren't completely comprehensible, but, like the way hearing kids babble (keep talking whether it makes sense to us or not, they're saying something), he kept his hands moving, his face making expressions, his voice making noises -- a signed version of babbling.
posted by frances1972 at 10:49 AM on April 10, 2006

I would really like to mark everyone's answer as 'best' since each one of you helped me quite a bit but I'm not sure you can do that on AskMe. So I'll just let you all know personally that I appreciate all of your answers.
posted by LeeJay at 8:49 AM on April 12, 2006