"Do profoundly deaf people who learn to talk have a voice in their head?"
-- Heather & Allen Exby

For starters, though, rest assured that you can cogitate, daydream and reminisce without employing any language system at all. "Have you ever been driving along in your car, and four thousand things are going through your head at once?" asks University of California at Irvine neurobiologist Greg Hickok. "There's no way you can think all that in English. And then there are those times when you say, 'I just can't find the words for it.' "

Now the question of whether a deaf person's inner voice communicates in sign language or English or Swahili is a complicated one. Most Americans who are born deaf learn to read and write English, in addition to some variety of sign language. Some learn to speak and lipread instead of signing. Other people may go deaf after learning the sounds of speech.

But when I stumbled across an Internet discussion of the "inner voice" question, I found people who were born deaf but who dreamed in spoken English.

Huh?

I e-mailed Peter Hauser, a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Gallaudet University. No one seems to have studied the question of deaf people's inner language, but Hauser, who is deaf, responded with insights I hadn't anticipated. Most interesting was his assertion that deaf people who were born to deaf parents, and who read well, create sounds in their heads as they learn to read.

"I asked my undergraduate students last week about their dreams," Hauser wrote to me. "Sometimes they are signing in their dreams, and sometimes they are speaking, even though some of them never speak in the so-called real world. BUT, they do not derive the message from the 'speaking' or 'signing' of others in their dreams. It's like the message is being transmitted through ESP!"