Question about autistics learning ASL
inthedreamer001 said to realsocialskills:
I am considering learning ASL, and I recently shadowed a local class. While I like the class overall, the teacher kept saying to the students “eyes to eyes, not eyes to hands” to prompt them to make eye contact while speaking ASL. Is this a universal ASL thing? If so, are there exceptions made in the autistic/neurodivergent community? Thanks!
realsocialskills said:
I don’t know enough about ASL and Deaf culture to give you a good answer to this. I’m posting this in hopes that someone who knows more than I do will weigh in.
There are two things I know that might be relevant here:
Thing #1: Sometimes there are competing access needs. Sometimes there’s a conflict between what one group needs and what another group needs. This is often not anyone’s fault, and negotiating it can be very complicated. Sometimes there’s no easy or short term solution.Â
Thing #2: There are important differences between how facial expressions work in ASL (and other signed languages) vs English (and other spoken languages.) Facial expressions are much more important in ASL than they are in English.Â
In spoken language, most of the information is communicated by sound. Most people who can hear can understand all or most of what someone is saying without looking at them. (Which is a reason that it’s possible to understand podcasts and radio programs.)
In spoken language, eye contact isn’t that important. You can communicate everything important without looking at someone’s face. (Unless they lipread and need you to be facing them so they can see your lips clearly.). Eye contact is a popular way to show respect, to show that you’re paying attention to someone, or to show that you’re speaking to them. There are other ways of communicating all of that.Â
ASL and other signed languages are different. Facial expressions mean a lot more, because ASL is an entirely visual language. Some important Information that is communicated through sounds in English is communicated through facial expressions in ASL. If you don’t look at faces, you miss a lot. (Much more than you’d miss in English.)
I don’t know what that means about autistic and other neurodivergent signers. I suspect that for some autistic people, looking at faces in ASL might be possible in a way that looking at faces in English isn’t. (Because maybe it just feels like language and not the intrusive eye contact thing.). But I don’t actually know. I also don’t know how the Deaf autistic and otherwise neurodivergent community handles this.Â
Does anyone who is more familiar with ASL and Deaf culture want to weigh in? How does signing and participation in Deaf culture work for autistic-and-similar people who have cognitive trouble with eye contact and looking at faces?
