SIO472: Anti-woke Crybabies Call ASL Interpreters Unnecessary. Here's the Fascinating Science Behind Why They Are Vital

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 472. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm so excited to bring you another episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. This one is a bit of an, kind of like a tweener of where there's woke and serious inquiries only, but I think you'll see why I'm hosting it here on SIO. It starts out as an anti -woke nonsense around sign language and interpreters, but along the way, Dr. Jenessa Seymour is here to teach us a lot about why those interpreters you see at press conferences and other functions like that are actually very, very important and more than you might think. And for reasons you might not necessarily think. So come for the stupid anti -woke controversy and stay for the education. Ooh, I also want to say Jenessa was kind enough to record a bonus. This is a Patreon bonus episode. You might've seen recently some coverage about a poll that purports to show that Gaza or Israel policy cost Kamala the election. And I thought who better to analyze that than Jenessa, who not only is a science -minded person who can read things like this and stats and all that, but also works in voting rights. So she has special insight into that. So if you go to patreon.com/seriouspod, you can find out whether or not the polling shows that Gaza cost Harris the election. And if you Go there, you Can also avoid the auto ads, which you're about to hear right now. We're going to take a break. Please support the show patreon.com/seriouspod. And after this break, we'll get to it.

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0:01:45 Thomas: Jenessa Seymour, welcome back, even though this is a bit of an anti -woke thing, welcome back to SIO, Serious Inquiries Only. How's it going? Yeah, it's not. I don't know. Why do we ask that? We should have abolished that question nine years ago.

0:01:53 Jenessa: It's, you know, I stayed up all night on the 19th playing video games, and slept through the inauguration, and then cleaned my whole house for the first time in months, so maybe I'm thriving under fascism, who knows? House.

0:02:03 Thomas: Nice. Yeah. And if you relate to that, you too might have ADHD or something. That sounds like a great plan, actually. All that. That's awesome. No, but I'm so glad you're here for this because this is a weird one. It's always like they're going after, you know, X like, oh, the woke. I need the anti version of that because their thing is like, oh, The Woke are taking away blank or The Woker doing whatever. And I need The Opposite, which is, oh the anti woke are saying the woke are doing whatever, you know, like we'll workshop it. I need some sort of like format for that. But that X, that thing is sign language, I guess, like Like, broadly, or it's just having someone be a sign language, like, yeah. And I'm like, what are we doing here? But it seems like there's also a ton of interesting stuff to talk about around this. And it sounds like it's going to be a really fascinating deep dive. So where do we begin? Shall we play the video?

0:02:56 Jenessa: Interpreters on screen, it seems like. Yeah, let's start with we've got a video clip of somebody talking about it and then I've got a tweet that is two conservative commentators on the same issue.

0:03:20 Clip: Can we please just do away with half the screen during these emergency briefings to the sign language interpreters?

0:03:23 Thomas: Yes, you can. Oh.

0:03:28 Clip: I have nothing against, obviously, people that cannot hear, but there's closed captioning. I mean, this is just over the top. We can't do this. We've got to get back to how it used to be. It's just too much. It's a distraction, is what it is. The reason is, they do these emergency briefings for fires or terrorist attacks, and you're looking at this and you are not listening. I don't like it so we got we just got it close captioning is perfectly fine I think I think we have to we got to get back to basics here joining us now now is Dr. Gad Saad we're here to talk

0:04:00 Jenessa: So you can stop there.

0:04:00 Thomas: My God. I didn't catch that. Oh, My God. Fucking gad sad oh that is so funny I did not catch that guy oh okay I'm gonna resist the urge to comment about him throwing to gad sad the biggest joke the biggest fucking joke in the anti -woke space ever it's so fun okay two seconds he's so funny because he's always trying to be the biggest piece of shit anti-woke but he just doesn't quite do it right and it comes across as like try hard. Like he wants to be worshiped like a narcissist, Elon Musk type, but he just kind of sucks. So it's like, but he also, I mean, he's super anti -woke. So he's getting, he has that like Evo psych background. So he has gained some following, but it's just pathetic. Anyway. Okay. Done with that. Done with that. Didn't even, I didn't catch it. Didn't play. I didn't know that the first time. Didn 'T catch that part, but yeah.

0:04:52 Thomas: What do you say? What, what is there to say about this?

0:04:50 Jenessa: That's Charlie Kirk, our co -founder of Turning Point USA. And in case it seems like Like, we're just, you know, picking out one asshole. I've also got a tweet from Christopher Rufo, callback to Where There's Woke, of New College, Florida board member.

0:05:11 Thomas: Right. Well, and he drives a lot of that, you know, when he decides that where they're going gonna do a new bullshit he can be pretty effective what

0:05:19 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. And he writes here, I'm sorry, but we have to stop with the ridiculous sign language interpreters who turn serious press conferences into a farce. There are closed captions on all broadcast channels and streaming services. No wild human gesticulators necessary. And he links to x.com/endwokeness. yes replying to him is miranda devine a conservative new york post columnist I think she used to have a australian podcast she writes in reply I actually think that's the point of them it's to reinforce our powerlessness

0:06:07 Thomas: God okay okay rock solid arguments air tight um oh there is one thing though maybe some people at the event can't hear there isn't closed captioning in I mean maybe someday with fucking some shitty elon musk neural link product that uh probably killed a bunch of people in the process and some monkeys but yeah no there's people there that might want to know what's being said at the important press conference.

0:06:29 Jenessa: Oops yeah

0:06:37 Thomas: Jeez, what a thing.

0:06:37 Jenessa: Yeah so I think like your average person reading that or hearing that is gonna know like your powerlessness like this is over the top this is ridiculous like why are you letting this bother you I think it might be less obvious why closed captioning actually isn't effective ineffective communication. It's not sufficient. And there's a lot of history and culture and science that's going on in the background here. Like this didn't come out of nowhere. This is like a over a hundred years battle about this. So I thought it could be, it's more than just 10 minutes of us being like, well, that's dumb. So, I think a good place to start is something thing that I think it's obvious once we explain it, but people tend not to realize, is American Sign Language is not just English with your hands. It is a completely different language. Obviously, it has its own words. You can see that it's not spoken, but it also has its own grammar. It's completely separate.

0:07:14 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, just dunking on these idiots. Yeah, for sure.

0:07:43 Thomas: That is obvious, but I've literally never thought of that. And oh, my God. Yeah, duh. Well, no, but like French is just English, but in French, though.

0:07:49 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like any two spoken languages are going to have different vocabulary and a different grammar. ASL, American Sign Language, and English have different vocabulary, different grammar, ASL will occasionally use a, there is spelling that you can do that will use the Latin alphabet, and you can spell out English words. That'll be most helpful for like spelling proper nouns, place names, your own name. But for the most part, it is completely divorced from English. It has nothing to do with English. One way to keep that memory in your head, sure.

0:08:36 Thomas: Like you think about it for two seconds, you're like, well, duh, it's another it's a different language. It's like, yes, any different language that you want to learn, if you are primarily an English speaker, your experience of it will be translating it into English. That doesn't mean it's English. Someone could be born never having heard English or whatever language and learn ASL, I assume, right?

0:08:59 Jenessa: Absolutely. So, for example, British Sign Language is different from American Sign Language. They are mutually unintelligible.

0:09:05 Thomas: Because they have to sign Govna after. Yeah, it's really tricky.

0:09:09 Jenessa: Yeah, they're completely unrelated. They're mutually unintelligible. An ASL user who goes to the UK would have to learn BSL, British Sign Language, whereas Auslan, Australian Sign Language has British Sign Language as its root. So they're different, but they have a lot of similarities. American Sign Language has French Sign Language as its root, so they have a lot of similarities. They're not identical, but they have cognates, kind of like how Spanish and Italian are going to have a Lot of Similar Words. So they are totally separate languages, and what's important there is to realize if American Sign language is your native language and you also read English, you are bilingual. That is reading in a separate language. And what can be tricky there? The way we usually teach reading English in the U .S. is sounded out.

0:10:14 Jenessa: That's not effective if you can't hear it. And lip reading is also less effective than people think. It depends on on the language, but English in particular can be quite difficult. So for example, the sounds P and B, the difference is just holding your lips together for about, I think it's like 300 milliseconds longer. So from the outside, just looking at your lips, there's not a really obvious difference. There's a lot of sounds that the lips look the same and the change is happening with the tongue, with the throat, it's not visible. Not every sound is visible on the lips. So saying, sound it out, look at my lips, not necessarily super effective. So what you end up with is, depending on the resources available to someone, the education they've received, you can end up with a lot of people who are fluent native users of American Sign Language, language but really can struggle to read English it may not have the same native fluency you may have reduced literacy you'd be surprised even in the like average U .S. population illiteracy is quite high it's 21 percent of people you know obviously if you're talking about literally couldn't recognize the Latin alphabet on a piece of paper yeah that's extremely low But 21 % of just U .S. adults are going to be classified under insufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low -level inferences based on written information that they've read. So that's already 21 %of adults are gonna read those captions and struggle to process.

0:12:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it makes so much sense, like having gone through the process of my kids learning to read it really, I mean, having to learn to read without hearing, I cannot imagine, like that's gotta be really hard. Cause when you think about it, what happens first is your kids learn a gajillion words just from speaking and they learn words. They don't learn them correctly often. It's hilarious, but they learn keywords. And then the part of learning to read, yes, they learn to like sound the stuff out, but mostly that's so that they can recognize what word it already is.

0:12:29 Jenessa: Mm-huh. Yeah. Right. They already know.

0:12:44 Thomas: Yeah. It's like, oh, they can say enough to, to, and you can see that process sometimes. And it's also interesting too, with words that are, you know, spelled kind of weird for kids. And there's a ton of them in English where they can, they Can quickly recognize words that are spelled plainly because they know the sound of it, but words that Are spelled a little weird or silent letters or, you Know, different things like that. They're like, and sometimes it clicks for them and they're like oh this word you know and it's really fascinating but I can't imagine how difficult it would be without that ability to just kind of like click and recognize the word you're seeing right away by hearing it right

0:13:18 Jenessa: Imagine if you were speaking English and then trying to read French. It's the Latin alphabet, but it's a different grammar and you're sounding out something and, you know, obviously we could hear it, but like there are sounds in other languages that we don't use. I had a friend in grad school who was studying this actually because because they were looking at, I believe it's, so Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects that are using the same written form of Chinese. And I think that's correct. And written Chinese is mostly what we would call logographic as opposed to orthographic. So our Latin alphabet is is orthographic. The letters represent the sounds and you recombine them in a way that makes the sounds. Obviously, English, like we said, has some weird ones like PH makes an F, but you learn that rule and there you go. For logographic languages, which there's an extent to which the way the character is shaped does represent the sound, but not nearly to the same extent as your average orthographic language. They teach their kids to read, and their kids don't struggle to read. So she was studying, well, how are Chinese parents in Chinese schools teaching their kids the Chinese logographic language? Because that's the strategy we need to employ for teaching kids who can't sound it out. And it's really interesting. It's taking taking time to transition because you also have the complication where 89 % of deaf kids are going to be born to hearing parents. The other 11%, if they're deaf kids born to deaf parents, decent chance we're talking about a family that is culturally deaf, that is using American Sign Language. And if you get exposed early, you're getting native acquisition. You're going to be be fine. Most of the research shows, even for kids born to hearing parents, if you get them early exposure, yes, maybe you're not using it fluently in the home as the hearing parent who's learning non -natively as an adult, but getting them exposure, bringing them to the deaf community and making sure they get that exposure, they can have native acquisition of ASL or any signed language. But it's a complicating factor that takes a lot of effort. And there's some cultural stuff going on there. So there's a long history of this. It's basically, there's this manualism movement, which is manual language, teaching signed languages. The US history of This is going to largely start 1817. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is going to come over from France, bringing french sign language that's where that root comes from and open a lot of manualist deaf schools let's teach kids signed languages let's get this going and of course any language is going to immediately when you give it to kids it takes off and they change it and they adapt it

0:13:36 Thomas: Start signing skibbity is yeah I know it's classic

0:16:44 Jenessa: Yeah, it changes so fast. It changes faster than you can imagine. He brings that over. Kids are learning. And in 1864, his son opens up Gallaudet University, which is still the only university taught in American Sign Language by and for deaf people. There's also Rochester Technical Institute for the Deaf. I guess like they make the distinction of like it's technically it's a college, not a university.

0:17:17 Jenessa: But, you know, whatever. They're both still institutions of higher education that have courses in ASL. But Gallaudet is you have to use ASL to go there, period. Of course, you can go there if you're hearing, but you need to. If you can't use ASR fluently, you're going to really get held back. So this is, you know, early to mid -1800s, manualism is taken off. There's deaf schools, residential deaf schools where, you know, if you're a hearing parent and you're like, oh, geez, how do I expose my kid to this? You can send them there and they can go away to school and be exposed to this and learn and become part of the culture. And it becomes really special and important to the deaf community. And then late 1800s, we all know Alexander Graham Bell as like guy who invented the telephone, whatever. He's also involved in a number of eugenics organizations.

0:18:15 Jenessa: And he writes a memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race. He argues that basically if you keep having these manualist deaf schools and you keep letting these deaf kids they get to know each other and then yeah yeah yeah they're gonna intermarry and they're going to have deaf kids and we can't have that now we got we got a whole race of deaf people but here's a quote from the book those who believe as I do that the production of a deaf race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world. We'll examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.

0:18:33 Thomas: It's the same guy it's the same guy as we just played he's doing the same bit okay oh boy you know at least back then they were just dumb and ill -informed you know because as I realize I'm like yeah but he the real story wasn't no he was just stirring up a fake controversy so that the government would let him sell more of his telephones without telephone regulations and this was a great way I mean maybe I'm wrong maybe that is what it is but it's sort of old -fashioned for for someone to just be incorrect in a really weird eugenics -y way and not just ironically or for shits or for lols. Refreshing.

0:19:19 Jenessa: I I mean, the deaf people aren't using it. Yeah.

0:19:33 Jenessa: It's tough. Yeah, like you can see those. I suppose so. Eugenics was extremely popular back then and it's making a comeback. That's happening. He becomes very prominent in this. In 1880, there's a conference of deaf educators, mostly hearing people. And the people promoting manualism were given about three hours to talk. And The People Promoting Oralism, the idea that you should only teach them spoken languages, they spent three days over the course of this conference promoting the idea that this was the best way to do it. And it led to, in the US and internationally, the closure of deaf schools. Many deaf schools kicked out their manualist teachers and replaced them with hearing oralist teachers. It starts with that eugenicist belief of like, we can't let them have a culture. And it slowly transitions to a sort of scientific racism of, no, no no, see what the problem is, is if you give them a signed language, they won't learn a spoken language. And that becomes a prevalent belief to the point that they're discouraging signed languages, they're tying kids' hands together to stop them from using it. Literally, Literally, yes. It was common practice. Because there's a bunch of deaf kids around each other. They're just going to invent a sign language if you put them together.

0:20:57 Thomas: My God. No way. Wow. I know this is old timey times, but like if your ideology results in tying kids' hands together, done. Wrong. Incorrect.

0:21:16 Jenessa: It can't possibly.

0:21:16 Thomas: I don't even need to hear anymore wrong

0:21:19 Jenessa: There's no thing that's a solution to, you know? Around the 1960s, we had a gradual shift back. There's a lot of residential, manualist schools taught by deaf teachers. There's a lot of mix of, you know, yeah, if four kids who pick up spoken language well enough, that's obviously a skill that's going to serve them in their day -to -day life, but not forcing it and certainly not to the exclusion of signed languages. There was a really long period where people kept publishing papers saying, well, look at these kids who learned signed languages and then didn't learn learn spoken languages. And it ignored a huge problem with basically the type of sample they were drawing and how they were conducting these studies. And when deaf researchers going to Gallaudet University, getting their PhD in linguistics and psychology and neuroscience start coming out, and they are looking at it from their own cultural perspective of, hey, hey, I actually grew up with this and I know what it was like and I know the type of questions to ask and how to ask it and I know what you're missing. They start conducting research and looking at, well, what's really going on here? And it becomes crystal clear. Exposing kids to sign language early on promotes the acquisition of other languages, including spoken languages, period. The data is indisputable. It sometimes occurs, in general, if kids have a language delay, so they don't get native acquisition of any language early in life, that is going to make it difficult to acquire any other language.

0:23:14 Jenessa: It's going to makes massive cognitive deficits across the board. Early language acquisition is critical to brain development. So selecting a sample of kids who got normal native language acquisition, all of a sudden we start to see it. To this day, you will find papers where people continue to push the narrative that you shouldn't give your kids sign language, that you need to get them a cochlear implant, you needと do oralism only, you needs to not expose them to sign language or else they'll never speak. And it's just not true. I mean, you'll find papers where normally the introduction section of a paper, it's like every other sentence has five citations. You're backing up every fact.

0:24:03 Thomas: Setting up like the landscape of the science right

0:24:05 Jenessa: Yes, yes. Fact inference, fact inference. And every fact is going to have a ton of citations and the one paper I always use as an example, they have pages and pages that look like that. And then the page that says, here's why we purposely didn't get kids who learned sign language, because they're going to have language delays. They go on for a page and a half without a single citation. It's just stuck in some people's heads and they can't get past the fact that there's no evidence to support this. So it lingers. There is this consistent cultural problem. And I think that's why nowadays, that's a paper from maybe, I don't remember the exact date, maybe 10 years ago. It's not old. And these are people alive today still doing research in the field. So it's a huge problem. I think it's important to put these things in context when we're seeing these conservative commentators saying this stuff. Why would deaf people have such a strong reaction to it. There's over 100 years of having their culture intentionally erased, their language intentionally erased, and researchers to this day not accepting the data that is so clear that this is good for kids. So the suppression continues. This is part of a larger story. This does not cherry picking some assholes. This Is continuing to happen. In.

0:24:43 Thomas: Are we talking now times now times wow yeah

0:25:40 Jenessa: There's definitely a lot we could talk about of some language in the brain science to end on some positive notes here. And there's also some cool legal stuff about why is that ASL interpreter on your screen? Because we forced them to. But I think that history is really important to think through why these captions in what may be a foreign language to somebody who was not given in access to literacy education, it's not sufficient. For people who are native ASL users who might not have strong English language literacy, no, a caption is not equivalent. It's not good enough. It's non -effective communication, which is what the Americans with Disability Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are going to require wire that the government provide. It's not an option for a lot of people, especially if you use AI, because it's going to make a ton of very silly mistakes. At a minimum, captions should always be cart service is what we call it. That's a human who is trained to type captions effectively live, not a computer.

0:26:43 Thomas: Oh god yeah captions are very frequently wrong I mean everyone can has that experience

0:26:58 Jenessa: I've been working with, as part of my job, the League of Women Voters. They do a lot of candidate forums so they'll bring candidates in and you know ask them questions kind of a debate not really because they try to keep it chill they're non -partisan non -profit just like us and we have teamed up with them to provide asl and cart services and just increases accessibility as much as possible and I had one chapter tell me they were just so glad to get a human captioner and not the like Zoom or YouTube AI because there's one candidate who's just always running who his last name is Bud and the AI kept writing butt. They're like, this is amounting to like partisan discrimination at this point. Nobody knows who he is. And yeah, it's really important to have a human captioner and ASL if you're going to have true effective communication here.

0:27:41 Thomas: Yeah yeah it's

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0:28:02 Thomas: Just interesting for a moment to step into the mindset of this I I mean, their mindset is there's a woke conspiracy of people who are trying to control your lives. And I'm being genuine, like they genuinely believe this, like, they want to control you. They want to do all these things they want. And like, since the real truth is, well, a lot of people are just like trying to make things a little better and more considerate for other people, the lengths they have to to go. The things they have to think that like this sign language interpreter to them, it can't be that, you know, we just genuinely want some folks to be able to follow along.

0:28:16 Jenessa: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

0:28:42 Thomas: You know, it can't be that. It has to be like, we're rubbing it in their faces that we can, that we cant. It's unbelievable. Like it's also so narcissistic to think the world revolves around them. Like the sign language interpretor has anything the fuck to do with you. If you're just Charlie Kirk, like has nothing to do with you it's incredible to think that that's where they are but to them it's another sign of what their woke deep state whatever you know captured institution blah blah blah it's what they're able to pull off it's a sign of the power they have that they're able to do something that is not directed toward them they just have this reaction of any effort effort that is made that is a different from some time in the past because that means it's changed and there's just the default reactionary mindset of a lot of people different from the past and is not for them automatic red flag for them it's such a crazy way to think and yet here we are

0:28:51 Jenessa: Yeah, yes. Right. Mm hmm. Mm hm. Mm hum. Right?

0:29:42 Jenessa: Yeah, there's this expression of like oh it's distracting or it's like a wild gesticulating and like okay first of all it's not gesturing and it's really important because for a long time again before linguists were coming out of Gallaudet deaf people doing this research there was a really prevalent opinion among linguists that signed languages were like oh those aren't like real languages those are proto-language. They're not full languages.

0:30:13 Thomas: I don't even know what that would mean yeah really

0:30:17 Jenessa: What it would mean to be a full language is essentially that something can be natively acquired. And if it was your only language access, that it would still lead to normal language acquisition and brain development and cognitive development. And that's part of this problem is if you think that's not true of these languages, you're going to think, well, we got to get them a spoken language. Those are the the real ones, those better ones. And it took a lot of work, a lot of really hard work and pressure to show in these scientific journals, like, no, it's real. It's affecting all the same brain areas. It works the same way. And, for example, the facial expressions, like that's not just somebody trying to be be expressive. It's part of the grammar. So for example, for questions, if I want to ask a who, what, when, where, why, you kind of pull the eyebrows together and scrunch. If I'm asking a yes or no, the eyebrows go up.

0:31:25 Thomas: I guess I didn't yeah let me ask you this I just again don't know anything about this if you were to only be able to see someone's hands, like what percentage of communication are you losing in sign language? Yeah.

0:31:34 Jenessa: You're definitely losing a lot. So like, for example if I were to just literally translate as opposed to actually give you like context, I could do the the sentence, you go there party. And if I just said that with like, and I don't give you anything in the face, that almost sounds like a command. But if I do it with my eyebrows up, I'm asking, are you going to the party? But if I said, you know them, that could be either eyebrows up. Do you know that? There's no do. There's No word for do. Eyebrows go up makes it a question. So if I say, eyebrows up, you know them, it's do you know them? If it's eyebrows neutral, it'S you know, them, I'm telling you, you Know, this person, let me describe, I can't remember their name, you KNOW them, let me describe them.

0:31:58 Thomas: Right. Right, right. Interesting. So what's interesting is obviously you could also say there's plenty of nonverbal communication in spoken language, like plenty of body language, but I actually think it's maybe doing a different thing because I think some different things, because it sounds like the, at least from what you're describing, I don't know how complete that is, but like, Like, it sounds like it's just replacing tone, pitch, you know, like there's all kinds of things we communicate in tone. Oh, do you know where, you Know, versus like, you Know, do, you Know, it's Just all kinds Of things, like, are you going to the thing, yeah, you going To the thing And it sounds Like, because that's Something that the direct pitch is something you're losing if you can't hear, so it makes Sense that that would be replaced by something else, to be able to have that same full kind Of communication.

0:32:58 Jenessa: To some extent. Yeah? To an extent? Yeah. So like, there is still the verb do, like, I'M gonna go do a thing. But there's do in a question sense, that type of, we don't even realize in English, those are two separate words that are homophones, but they are. They serve two completely different like semantic, they have different meaning. And so in ASL, you kind of just get rid of one of them and you do it with the face.

0:33:39 Jenessa: There's also what you're describing, like the tone in the up and down, the fancy word would be prosody.

0:33:44 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, I always thought that was prosody. I thought that that's that word. Okay.

0:33:49 Jenessa: You know, now that you say it,

0:33:50 Thomas: I just, no, I only read it. So I had no idea.

0:33:52 Jenessa: I may have also only read it for all I know. We could both be right. Who could say? Somebody. I probably have heard someone say it, but parts

0:33:58 Thomas: I'm going to go ahead and assume you're right. Yeah. I would bet you have.

0:34:06 Jenessa: Of prosody are going to be, you can still have that aspect of tone is obviously there's not literally tone, but there's ways that you can change the way that you're signing. You know, you Can pull, pull your signs really small and tight to the body, or you can be signing really big. Yes.

0:34:18 Thomas: Right. Right? A lot of that could still be signed. Yeah. A lot of that tone could still, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah. And it also, by the way, I'm sure there's also sarcasm. There's also plenty of ways that like you mismatch these tones. If this is the only form of communication that some people have or the, like the overwhelming main form of communication, they're all going to have all the same things that

0:34:28 Jenessa: So, some of it is expressive. Some of it is grammatical necessary. If you don't do this with your face, I don't know what the hell you just said. Like, that is meaningless now. So it's sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes it's more expressive. Oh, yeah. Right.

0:35:00 Thomas: You and I have sarcasm and, you know, probably a tone, like a tone of mockery and a tone like there's probably, there's All that stuff will be something slightly different, and it's super fascinating. So, so interesting to think about.

0:35:05 Jenessa: Yeah. Yes, Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and this is actually where, you know, once signed languages got accepted into the linguistics community, it's an incredible tool because for the longest time, people would try to say, well, what is unique to language A and language B versus what is universal to language? And then they would only study spoken languages, and that's not going to help you. If we believe we understand that signed languages are real languages, they are full languages, then something that is only in spoken languages or only in signed languages is not universal to language. It's only when you see it happen in both that you're like, wow, that seems like something that all language has in signed and spoken. So just like you're saying, you know, there are ways to break it down and look for one study I really loved. In spoken languages, you obviously can't laugh while you're talking.

0:36:21 Thomas: Interesting. Mm -hmm.

0:36:22 Jenessa: So the question was like, okay, speakers are kind of, in a way, it almost seems like they punctuate their stories with laughter. But maybe that's just because they can't laugh while they're talking? Well, you can laugh while your signing. So what What they showed was they had people just get up and tell a story. Here's your audience and everybody take turns. And what they found was unlike spoken language users, the audience of signers would laugh in the middle of stories because it's not interrupting.

0:36:55 Thomas: Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Sure. Really? Huh.

0:36:58 Jenessa: Whereas like if you ever watch any comedy and there's that whole build of laughter thing of like, you know, you don't want to interrupt a speaker too much. If something's really funny, you can't help it. But laughter does way more than just show that something's funny. It's very communicative. The speaker, on the other hand, the signer who's telling the story still uses laughter as punctuation. They don't laugh when they're signing. Yeah. So it illustrated that the way spoken language users punctuate their stories with laughter is something that seems more, is it language? Is it social? Is it a communication tool? Whatever it is, it's not because, oh, they just can't laugh while they're talking. Like, no, there's a social thing going on there.

0:37:49 Jenessa: I think we've talked about this before, the brain can entrain to a rhythm, right? So if I were to just, like, your neurons start firing like this at the same rhythm, and we'll see it start to pulse like that. We could do this with a flash. It's called a steady state visual evoked potential when it's visual. This is why flashing lights can cause seizures for some people. If you get that, like like synchronized activity, and it spreads. But for the most part, we can use that to get your visual cortex to flicker at the same rate as a flickering light. This is the tech behind a lot of brain -computer interface. Hey, if you want to type the letter A, pay attention to the top right screen. That's flashing at one frequency. If you want a type of B, pay at the top of the screen. Pay attention to bottom right. Obviously, it's not exactly A and B, but you know. And we can, with the EEG measure, oh, when you paid attention up here, your brain flashed at this rate. That must be what you're looking at and what you are paying attention to. Great.

0:38:57 Thomas: It's that, like, quick? Like, it adjusts that fast? Sure. Yeah. Sounds like not minutes, though. Like, yeah.

0:39:00 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not like milliseconds, but oh, jeez. I'm not going to, don't quote me on the exact timing. It's quick, but it's not that quick. So it is relatively slow. I had friends in grad school who, not minutes, No, no, no. I had friends in grad school who were working on how to speed this up with like, hey, instead of just doing breaking down the alphabet in like a certain number of letters on each one, what if we did, we know which letters are the most common in the English language. Like, let's group these a little better. It's really cool stuff. Of. So we know that flickering lights or rhythmic sounds, we can get your neurons to fire at that same rate. Language has, they called it quasi -periodic. It's got a rhythm. It has got a flow. I don't talk like a computer. It is not exactly a rhythm, but it has got some sort of rhythm to it this is kind of why you ever be like in another room and you can't understand a single word people are saying but you know there's a conversation over there it's that that's the thing you're picking up is like there's something just very languagey something very

0:40:18 Jenessa: Speechy going on over there so it turns out babies are super tuned into this they're really looking for it and you can get them to attend to, obviously, language, spoken language at that frequency, and also signed languages. Operate with that same quasi -periodic rhythm and the brain will entrain to it and tune into it. And even just plain old rhythms, if you can replicate that that kind of quasi -periodic rhythm, and it's not even language, babies will still kind of tune in and be like, what is that? It's very attention -getting for them. That seems to be the thing that gets them to pay so much attention to language and want to, you know, want to learn it. And we see it in signed and spoken languages. It's activating the same brain areas, it's making the brain behave in the same way. There's also like, you might not know the term, but I bet you'll guess immediately what I mean when I say infant directed speech.

0:41:28 Jenessa: So it's kind of like if you go get your kid out of the crib, you're not like, hey, what's up? It's like, hi. Yeah. Yeah, the like, Hi, how are you? Did you have a good nap?

0:41:35 Thomas: Oh, the high pitched noise tone where you're trying to teach them stuff. Yeah. Oh it's just Miss Rachel. Yeah, right.

0:41:44 Jenessa: And like, yeah, if I would never talk to an adult like that, it would be extremely insulting. Yeah, that does actually get baby's attention.

0:41:49 Thomas: Unless you're being sarcastic. Right. Which is incredible because like how the fuck do we know to do that. It's just like that's a really subtle evolved behavior, I guess, because like nobody knows that like for real, you know, especially going back, you know, decades and centuries. I'm sure that's just a thing that we like naturally started to do. Yeah, it could go the other way. Yeah. It's like maybe we have that instinct to do that. And then, you Know, babies are attuning to like, oh, that's the tone I need to listen to, you know?

0:42:08 Jenessa: I think to some extent it's a bit circular, like the baby trains you. Yeah, I think it's little like you do it and then the kid pays so much more attention than if you use adult directed speech, which is what we're doing right now. So because they paid attention to it, you do it more, and you're going to just pick up on it. There's infant -directed signing. Yeah.

0:42:45 Jenessa: The adults signing to small children will adjust their sign language use to be, there's a lot more what they call path movement. So some signs are close to the body and they They might move, yeah,

0:43:01 Thomas: That's exactly what I was imagining already. Like, yeah. Cause I mean, it's, I imagine a lot of it is kind of mirrored and just body language that, you know, in some ways that we communicate with kids, like those, those kinds of movements we do. Interesting. Yeah. Wow.

0:43:08 Jenessa: Yep, yep. Yeah, pull their attention in. So they will choose signs that draw the kid's attention in by moving across the body. And you can adjust it to do it bigger. Because what changes the meaning of a sign? You know, there's different hand shapes. There's different orientations of the hand to the body you know the same sign at the forehead or the chin or the chest the same hand shape at those positions can mean different things but doing the sign a little bigger isn't necessarily going to change the meaning for the most part that's more communicating it's more of a prosody thing it's mehr of a tone thing Exactly. So you pull the kid's attention in by taking signs that have path movement and doing them bigger and doing the more excited. And so you have infant directed speech, you have infinite directed signing. It's all there. There. There have been lots of attempts to say, oh, let's use closed captioning. Let's use this. Let's us that. One of the things we had to fight about was like, well, what if you can just go get the ASL from another website? What if, you know, it's not live on the

0:43:59 Thomas: Emphasis maybe.

0:44:16 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:44:32 Jenessa: TV, but don't worry, we record it later.

0:44:35 Thomas: If we make a separate, but equal way to do it, it is like, come on.

0:44:37 Jenessa: Eggs. Yeah. This was actually, okay, so I should say I am just here in my personal capacity, not on behalf of my organization, all my own opinions, but the organization I work for brought a lawsuit about this during the COVID broadcasting in 2020, Martina Zui Cuomo, because what Cuomo was doing was, well, you know, we have the closed captioning and we have an ASL interpreter who does it later and it shows up on the website. And what we successfully argued in in a preliminary injunction was, hey, not everybody reads closed captions, and you need to get this information out quickly because, much like the wildfires, which is the example today, kind of important to get the COVID information ASAP. You also have the issue that a lot of people with disabilities don't have internet access. So of people without disabilities in the U.S., 91.5% have reliable internet access, which is still too low at this point. The internet is necessary for life by now. But among people with disabilities, it's 78.4%. So you have a huge problem of picking out a population who has less internet access and saying, oh, we'll just offer it off the TV. That's not going to work either. So it really is the proper effective communication is having this person on TV. And if you really understand the history of this, everything that went into showing that ASL is a full language and it operates the same way in the brain and it's part of deaf people's culture and it is so important to preserve for mental health for cultural health for brain health this argument that we need to get this off our TV because it's somehow bothering hearing people is it's it's so much worse than it even sounded the first time you heard it and it sounds really bad to begin with yeah

0:46:45 Thomas: Yeah, I mean it's like so many things we cover it's very easy to ignorantly dismiss something and to demagogue on it it's so easy to do that it's a lot harder to understand and you know Um, but it's such a it's it's so much more fascinating it's what a world of interesting insight and study and stuff. And in that, I mean, it's really mind blowing to think about like dialect and stuff when it comes to ASL. And it's also obviously it's like, well, yes, obviously that would all be true.

0:47:17 Thomas: But it's still, you know, there's a lot of things that if you don't think about it, if you don't encounter it, it's kind of mind blowing.

0:47:22 Jenessa: Yeah absolutely it's you know I want to always be generous with if you haven't stopped to think about it, of course, there are things you would miss.

0:47:29 Thomas: All right. Well, that was really fun. Super interesting. Anything else that you want to make sure you said on this?

0:47:35 Jenessa: I think those are the big points. You know, if there's ways to gently communicate this to confused people, hopefully this is a resource.

0:47:44 Thomas: For sure. All right, well Dr. Jenessa Seymour, thank you as always. I am really excited to also be recording a little bonus with you that I'm sure I've already told listeners about so we can look forward to that on patreon.com/seriouspod but until next time can't wait to uh speak again

0:48:02 Jenessa: Thanks.