CAPS #3 - Kim Boyer

In reading this week's assignment I was really interested in the concept that came up while reading chapter seven. Growing up there were deaf children or children that had hearing difficulties in my school, I sat in classrooms with them on a regular basis and grew accustomed to the microphone my teacher had to use to speak to the class. I often wondered though, in my wondering thoughts if they thought of things differently because they didn't hear like I did. I wondered if things sounded the same to them as they did me, and if they didn't what were they hearing and thinking during their process?

It was interesting to see and read that through research it was proven that children who had a hearing impairment or were deaf did not have a different worldview. They have the same cognitive skill as those who can hear. This got me to think about other research results. Another research experiment, that although there is no deficiency in skill, information is received differently but perceived the same. The people in this specific research, they were tested using semantics which is by definition is the the study of meaning, and they were also tested on sentence processing. They studied children from all different backgrounds, these included; deaf children of deaf parents, deaf children with hearing parents, hearing children that had dyslexia and children who had no hearing deficits. The conclusion was that the line of the thinking was the same for all the children, there was no deficit in cognition for any of them. No matter how the information is received it is still thought about in the same way. 

This now raises another question, how about those who once could hear but are now slowly losing the ability? We all have heard either our grandparents or elderly folks ask us to speak up because they "can't hear" or have heard sounds that even our parents can no longer hear. 

I always wondered if older people also thought about things differently because of their loss of some hearing or potentially all, if they had a different thought process. After reading this all my questions from childhood that I was too afraid to ask are now answered. 

We all took those hearing tests in school right? The ones were they pulled you aside and had you wear these decent sized headphones and made you listen to certain sounds. You had to listen to beeps, chirps and other noises and you had to either raise your hand, nod your head or answer them yes or no if you could hear them. Now this would have been universal for those students who did not even speak English, sound is universal. This definitely makes sense now that we think about it right? The process is the exact same, for even those who don't speak the same language. This is an interesting thought about intercultural communication and how there are different ways of communicating other then just language. 

Here is a fun example of how hearing is perceived by a various amount of people: 

Works Cited

Martin, Judith N., and Thomas K. Nakayama. Intercultural Communication in Contexts. Boston, Mass: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Print.

N.p., n.d. Web.

"Unlocking the Mysteries of the Deaf Brain." RIT -. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.