It began after I read The Catcher in the Rye. It was the first time in a while that I voluntarily read a book in my spare time and I thought it was great. There is richness in reading that you can't get out of a film or TV show or whatever. I also read Jane Eyre for English in the holidays and I really enjoyed that too. So I developed a renewed appreciation of reading and I started thinking about how Stephen King wrote that literature is 'refined thought'. When we read we hear the words on the page being spoken aloud. Unlike a film, we don't hear it with our ears because the voice is coming from inside our head. That's a very powerful thing.Anyway, after a while my thoughts branched off and it occured to me that if literature is 'refined thought' then thoughts are based on spoken language. You may be thinking: "Well no shit dude, we think in words. What kind of epiphany is that?" My point is that when I thought hard about this I realised how important language is, not only for communicating with others but to grasp abstract ideas such as our own emotions. Of course even in prehistoric times, humans probably could understand simple emotions like 'happy' and 'sad' without using words. But I doubt they could easily understand emotions like guilt or pity. So language allows us to label otherwise intangible abstract ideas and form complex chains of thought.
My next thought was to wonder if this made things hard for people born deaf. I wondered what ran through their minds as they read books. An internal voice cannot exist for them because they have no idea what spoken language sounds like. Perhaps to them the words existed only as symbols which held sublime, indescribable meanings. Maybe because of this, reading is a more acute experience to the deaf. Or maybe it just sucks because the pleasure of reading is perhaps dependant on spoken language. This is definitely true for a lot of poetry which relies on rhythm and sounds. It was pretty late at night when I was thinking about this stuff and I was getting pretty tired so I went to sleep.The day (or two) after, I had another thought about the topic. What language do deaf people think in, if they can think at all? This fascinated me enough to do a Google search about it. I found this page, which provided a more scientific perspective on the whole thing. Those who are born deaf (or profoundly deaf) and do not receive proper treatment can develop problems with cognitive function. If they are not diagnosed during the critical age of 21-36 months, they can suffer severe learning problems despite the fact their intelligence is otherwise normal.
So what's the 'proper treatment' for the profoundly deaf? They are taught sign language, which replaces spoken language with a gestural one. Sign language isn't like Morse code or anything, where English words are changed into gestures letter by letter. It's more like Chinese, where each word is represented by a different gesture.
I'm getting lazy now so I'll just copy paste a paragraph from the above link to conclude.
The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like--the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian. Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person. Still, sometimes we can get a glimpse. Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. "Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane," Sacks writes. "She was dreaming in Sign."
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