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Individuals who are born deaf use the "hearing" part of their brain to feel touch and to see objects, suggests new research that highlights the plasticity of the human brain. The new study, detailed online July 11 in The Journal of Neuroscience, shows that deaf people use the so-called auditory cortex to process both touch and visual stimuli much more than hearing individuals do.

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

"People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study."

How it is turn learn sign language and be raised through a completely different culture than a person that is not deaf is difficult. This article talks about what a child grows through as they are born deaf.

The World Health Organisation counts 430m people as deaf or hard of hearing. Many use sign languages to communicate. If they cannot also use those languages to talk to computers, they risk being excluded from the digitisation that is taking over everyday life. Sign language poses particular issues in re: its translation to either text or speech. Some challenges include improving the machine-learning algorithms that recognise signs and their meaning and developing the best methods to interpret sign languages' distinctive grammars. The applications of such technology could improve the lives of the deaf, for example, allowing them to use their cell phones to search for directions or look up the meanings of unknown signs, without resorting to the written form of a spoken language.

People in Philadelphia speak with a distinctive Philly accent, and those who converse in sign language are no different. The area is known for having one of the most distinctive regional sign language accents, and two researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania are trying to figure out why. In sign language, an accent is apparent in how words are signed differently-it's a lexical difference, similar to how some Americans say "pop" while others say "soda," explains Meredith Tamminga, one of the professors conducting the research. Some possible reasons: the first sign language teacher in the United States and the person who founded the first Philadelphia school for the deaf, Laurent Clerc, was a Frenchman. Many Philadelphia deaf signers were educated at the school, and moreover, remained geographically stable, limiting their exposure to signers who used conventional ASL. While ASL has evolved to a distinctive American sign language over time, the Philadelphia version maintains more of its French roots.

Does someone who was born with a hearing loss "hear" an inner voice? Several people who have experienced hearing loss have contributed to the discussion, and their responses make fascinating reading. First, why is the question of interest?

Recently, researchers have found a new language within Hawai'i, Hawaiian sign language. It has apparently been used since the 1800's by the deaf in Hawaii. Some linguists claim that it could be the last language to be discovered in the United States.

A dying language has been uncovered here in Hawai'i. Researchers are calling its existence ground-breaking - especially considering how close it came to being lost forever. Now a team of experts are working together to revive Hawai'i Sign Language, the indigenous language of Deaf people in Hawai'i. Researchers have identified 40 Native signers of Hawaii Sign Language. Most are in their 70s or older, which is why linguists say without this effort to restore HSL-the language would've died with this generation.

Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.

Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language.

Deaf people from Philadelphia have a noteworthy, distinctive regional accent in their signg language. When most people talk about a dialect in spoken languages, and in sign languages too, a lot of what they center on are lexical differences: differences in words. In ASL, there are many, many signs that have lexical differences. For example, the (Philadelphia) sign for hospital is exceptionally different from what standard ASL would be, and among other things. To the point where the signs are not able to be deciphered based on what they look like. The historical reason for the differences between Philadelphian sign language and standard ASL: the first school for the deaf was founded by a French teacher, and therefore Philadelphia sign is more akin to French signing than American signing.

This is an article about the experiences, inner thoughts, and struggles of a girl who is deaf. From this article, I learned and realized many things such as how difficult lipreading can be. Originally, I was amazed at how deaf people could read lips and thought they could understand every word someone said. However, I learned from this article that that is NOT true and things such as accents and a lack of expression can make it difficult for one to decipher what is being said.

From my personal blog

The brains of people who cannot hear adapt to process vision-based language, in addition to brain changes associated with the loss of auditory input.

Long lost footage documenting the deaf community's fight for civil rights is being shown in cinemas across the UK. The British Deaf Association is marking its 125th anniversary with a film made from footage dating back to the 1930s which was rescued from a skip.

When Nicaraguan teachers failed to communicate with their 200 deaf students, the students worked together to create a linguistic structure of their own. Judy Kegl, a sign-language expert was contacted to try and decode their new language.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

This article talks about an interesting discovery that our speed to understand language may be able to change, as deaf people, who are more used to sign language, were also quicker to recognize human body language unrelated to sign language.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They're using it to transform American Sign Language. For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.