Not new - but I’d forgotten how great this BSL Zone show about Visual Vernacular is. Really great stuff.
Today’s article about the Dinner Table Effect in the Limping Chicken reflects the author’s own experience and I absolutely take no issue with anybody’s personal experience of this effect. However, Liam’s concluding comment of “Forget it, I’ll eat in the living room” is not a solution for many people.
Not all people experience this, but having provided therapy over the last decade to Deaf children and young people, more than half of them dreaded this issue. The problem was not that Christmas Dinner is hard - but that Christmas Dinner reminds you that your family did not effectively adapt to your needs when you were born.
The Dinner Table Effect is not a problem - it is a symptom of a much deeper problem. The problem that despite being screened and diagnosed as deaf within a couple of months of birth, the medical and social care communities rallied around the family to focus entirely upon fixing ears, rather than upon ensuring a rich language environment for the child. For a deaf child, that language environment must be visual, accessible, and effective. This does not mean an English-approximated system of gestures. It means a signed language with a grammar that has evolved naturally within the ecosystem of deaf people across the millennia.
The child’s window for acquisition of their first language is at best five years from birth; and that first language - any language as long as it is effectively embedded - is the foundation of all later cognitive development: educational attainment, social skills-building, theory of mind development, income, and quality of life. Remember too that developing a first language does not restrict developing a second, or a third. Indeed - the sooner you establish your first, the more easily you will learn others.
The Dinner Table Effect is a reminder of the harm that naive health and social care professionals can do to confused and vulnerable parents upon the birth of their deaf child, and the distraction from, or direct rejection of, Sign Language that they engender.
When your car breaks down you catch the bus. You might prefer to drive but if you spend five years tinkering with the car you will miss the party.
Read more about this issue in the Harm Reduction Journal.
Excellent.
Healthwatch Plymouth have released their report regarding Language Empire and their provision of BSL Interpreters to the Deaf Community in Plymouth.
It’s an old story, but it is important to tell it and re-tell it until somebody somewhere rebuilds this broken system.
Jemina nails it completely with regards to Danielle Hansbury’s* viral Brexit interpretation this week.
(1) It’s a shame that the @DailyMailUK report of this viral tweet dumbed down what @bslbridge was doing. She wasn’t ‘attempting’ to translate - she *was* interpreting very accurately the meaning of what was being said. She wasn’t inserting any opinion on Brexit. https://t.co/IzgJ6Rlzyk
— Prof Jemina Napier, PhD (@JeminaNapier) 16 November 2018
*I think.
I read this article on Limping Chicken today, talking about why Deaf people should go into research. Thomas talks about how research is brilliant and how it benefits the research and the researchers, but I think it goes even deeper than that.
I come from a mental health background and the need for Deaf research into Deaf experiences is particularly evident.
Imagine we want a questionnaire for autism. Pretend there is one for hearing kids. It's really good. It gives you a score out of 100 for imagination, social skills, and social language. Get less than 50 on all three and you have autism. Pretend. What about Deaf kids? You could translate it into BSL, but how do you know the translation is any good? Back-translation is the methodology of choice, but it only considers linguistic equivalence (not clinical) and for BSL a shoddy SSE translation of the items will back-translate more apparently equivalently than a decent culturally relevant interpretation. I think back-translation stinks for these purposes. But even if it were flawless, what is it measuring? Is delayed language in Deaf kids the same as in hearing kids? No. It might index autism for hearing kids, but for Deaf kids it also indexes having hearing parents, poor education, lack of confidence, etc. Likewise social confidence and social skills. If they score low are they autistic? That 50-point cut-off is based upon research on otherwise-completely-normal hearing kids. Anybody with a confounding condition is excluded from the study that gave them the normative sample and defines the cutoff. Like all the Deaf folk. There cut off is somewhere else.
So you need a normative sample of autistic and non-autistic Deaf kids against whom to compare your possible autistic kids. Do THAT research. Should be easy right? Nope. How do you identify the autistic deaf kids? There's only hearing assessment tools. Catch-22.
And anyway the entire CONCEPT of autism (or anything else) is based upon clinical experience and statistical cluster analysis of symptom presentation in HEARING PEOPLE. It doesn't make much sense for Deaf people. What IS autism for Deaf kids? It's probably a different thing. So do THAT research. That's REALLY where to start. Deaf kids' cut-off is not elsewhere on the number line - it's on a different number line entirely!
And you need to do it in BSL. And you need to write it up in BSL. In a BSL journal. Because if you let English into it it is contaminated with Hearing-world concept-space again and you'll never get the stain out.
This level of paranoid obsessionality is why I don't do research.