I had asked Hauser, who also studies American Sign Language linguistics, if the Internet was inspiring slang signs. He's encountered none, but told me about a sign with no English equal -- "a squeezing gesture with your hand in front of your neck. If, for example, you tell me that deaf people cannot have an inner voice, and I show you that they can, you would make that sign. It means 'Gulp. You got me.'"
Discovery Online, The Skinny On ... Deaf People's Inner Voice
"My best answer to this," Hauser wrote, "is that the brain has a special capacity to develop phonological representations, even when it does not have auditory input. The representations might be dramatically different from what hearing individuals hear. Nevertheless, they function in the mind as 'sounds.'" Deaf schizophrenics, he continued, have auditory hallucinations, and blind schizophrenics have visual ones.
