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Deaf Children Invent Language
gmuslera writes "According to this story, Nicaraguan deaf kids, without knowing any existing sign language, invented their own language on their own, and it keeps evolving. Is this going in the same way as Varley's The Persistence of Vision?"
I must go to Nicaragua and study this so I can become a neurolingquistic hacker and control all of you with just a few gestures... Muahahahah!
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Nim Chimsky was wrong!!
http://www.commaecho.com
I mean, it's all well and good that they developed their own language. But what if they didn't? Seems a bit of a risk to deprive these children of learning an existing sign language just for the sake of an experiment. What next? Are they going to lock some normal Nicaraguan children up and see if they come up with a new spoken language?
Ancient news, and contrary to the unending hype no one has ever rigorously established that none of the kids had any prior exposure to sign language. The argument actually boils down to "we don't know of any prior exposure for any of the kids involved".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In Pysch class, we were told about these towns in Germany. They were two neighboring towns and both spoke german. The maids/slaves or whatever they were, on the other hand, were from all over the world, so none of them knew how to communicate. After the maids were released, they all met up in one location. Because they all spoke a different language, they tried to make up their own language.
As time went on, they had children in this new town. Childrens brains are adapted more to learning languages, so the children actually solidified this language.
I'm pretty sure that's how the story went. This was Psych class from almost 2 years ago.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
From the synopsis:
'The US is in yet another serious "non-depression" and the narrator is out of work again.'
So... yes.
Read Pynchon.
Grrr... I'm sure I read it on slashdot before. Why can't I find it?
4Z5TX
Something like this was covered a long time ago in "The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design."
The particular article dealt with stages of language. There's rough communication (usually done by adults in a foreign country that don't speak the language). There's pidgin, which is invented by the children and is a blend of the original and native tongues. Then there's a real language that pops, usually created by kids listening to the pidgin.
I guess it happened again, so it's reproducable now and could be considered a "fact."
It's been years since I've read the above book. It's a classic in the field, but is probably long in the tooth by now.
This is a well-known occurrence, and is very well covered in "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker, which I can highly recommend for anyone interested in language.
-Lars
This news is so old, it's discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" published in 1995, which I've just been reading. He cites this as one of many examples establishing a biological basis for language. He specifically discusses the fact that a limited, pidgin sign language was originally developed by adults, but that the children who came to the school and learned it in their critical early years developed it independently into a full-fledged, grammatical language with all the subtlety and nuance of other sign languages and spoken languages. The grammatical usage of the language would essentially appear to come out of nowhere, including things like rules for establishing case and sentence word roles and the like that weren't built into the original sign language. And that the grammatical rules became rapidly consistent within the young deaf population.
I think you mean:
Arrrr! Ye scurvey dogs shall walk the plank! Blast this skullduggery!
Hoorah! National Talk Like A Pirate Day has arrived!
if animals can do it, why should we be suprised to see humans do it?
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Blast ye moderators. Arrr.
New Zealand sign language started under similar circumstances. Deaf children in a school simply created a way to communicate.
But i guess even in nature, information wants to be free...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Obviously the children are going to need to develop some way to communicate with the world around them. Almost all deaf children (and young hearing children) develop some form of gesture language before "proper training" is given. Think a young hearing child who walks to their parents holding their arms up in the air wanting to be picked up for a hug, it's the same principle.
This study doesn't prove anything of the kind. As reported, it only shows that people can learn language. Of course that includes the capability of developing language constructs. How else did we ever start speaking? It also shows that you don't need to be able to talk or hear in order to develop language skills, and that's not really new either.
9 96411 had more details. But notice that some of the people in the study have other agendas and hope that acceptance of this study can help them further their own views http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/topics/gp.html.
Anyway, the New Scientist article http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
In being taught sign language, the deaf community still have adapted ASL (American Sign Language) to their own needs, as it were.
Sign language is unique in the fact that some of the language is what some people would guess, correctly, what it was. Like sticking out your thumb and pinkie and holding up to your ear for "phone".
Speaking from personal experience, and having being taught sign language as my first language, English being second, I find that the deaf and hard of hearing have their own ways of saying things. Personally, I haven't been taught in the "offical" way, but taught by my mother. In that, I find that when you know someone, you often tend to bend the sign to fit what the both of you know.
I know "ghetto sign language", as it were.
Ahoy me matey! The scurvey dog of an editor should be modded redundant then thrown to Davey Jones locker!
invented their own language on their own
Arrrrrrr! 'Tis redundant see!
P.S.
Ye shoulda linked yonder page.
As for the origin of sign language, it's as old as the origin of Native American tribes. Anyone who has taken an ASL course would know that Native American tribes used signs as a sort of inter-tribal language among themselves.
Even after that, it is not rare for an isolated group of people to develop a language of their own. That is exactly how sign language developed (Somebody didn't just make up a system of sign language out of pity for the deaf who couldn't possibly communicate on their own). Even now, a small group of people often come up with their own system for basic communication needs (i.e. mother and baby, a deaf person without formal education and his close family, etc.) Also, twins are known to come up with their own languages--this is a very well documented case.
This article falls short of other details that might have been interesting. It says,
That method of communicating now shows similarities to other languages, researchers say in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
What similarities? That it is used to communicate (isn't it how one defines language)? Knowing the diversity of modern languages, I find it difficult not to find any similarity to other languages. Do they tend to put the subject in front of everything else? Every language does that (for obvious reasons...). Do they tend to omit the subject? I know Korean does that regularly, whereas in English it's done only when brevity is paramount. Do they sometimes put the object first? Find any inflected language and you can do that there as well (usually means emphasis on the object, though). Tell me when the children have matured enough to learn multivariable calculus on their own and they happen to use the inverted capital delta for their "del" operator. Then I will be astonished at the similarity. Frankly, I doubt that this new language thing will go far (same case with twin language--for the twins to live in the world, they have to learn the language of their society, the process which inevitably all but destroys their own language). Or, if it is to "evolve" to show a parallel structure, well, expect to have generations of isolated (hereditary) deaf children for a century or a millenium.
Even the article's sidenotes about similarity among existing languages is trivial.
The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more nouns than other types of words. The researchers said this held true regardless of whether the language emphasized nouns, as does American English, or verbs, as does Korean.
Might as well say, "The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more words related to food or household item than words used to describe linear vector spaces or binary operation structure." Of course they know more nouns! That's what the mothers teach most, because it's the easiest thing to teach ther children. And, I'll bet, among nouns, the children know more concrete nouns abstract nouns. It's not just that. In all the languages I know (and I know more than 2, if you count a few dead languages), nouns comprise the biggest group of part of speech. Also, usually, there is always a way to make a word from any other part of speech (excepting a few specialized parts like conjunctions or articles) into a noun (but not the other way around--for example, how would turn the noun "apple" into a verb?).
This study reveals nothing new--that is, other than the fact that there are too many (useless) researchers around the world with too much time on their hands (even then, that's not new either, eh?).
that cavemen didn't create an evolving language like a billion years ago.
oh, wait.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
So can it run on linux?
never understood it, till i did it
and other important comments useful to the everyday situations of young people?
off topic?! that was clearly in the spirit of TFA.
or am i the only one that picked up on the humor?
...at least in English.
You haven't appled somebody recently?
I went appling with my wife yesterday.
He used to use Windows, but trying OS X totally appled him.
Usage #2 would probably be the most easily understood.
And BTW, every verb does have its own nounification.
-Lars
First Post!
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
What's the sign for goatse man?
My home tutor (ex now) once had two students (twins) who spoke their own language. Their parents never corrected their poor English and it evolved to the point where no one knew what they were saying.
Now think of how much of a nightmare it is for them to communicate with others, since no one but them understands the language they can't teach others it.
Wouldn't the same apply here?
I like muppets.
Totally off-topic, but totally on-slashdot.
In the 1980's when I was a kid growing up in the Finnish countryside, there also lived a man that had been deaf and dumb from birth. He was born in the 19040's or so, so he never received any schooling, nor got to shipped off to a institution.
He lived pretyt normally, exept he didn't know any existing language. He had his own language of signs and noises. Everybody in the village understood him, even a lot of people elsewhere kenw him and understood his language. He functioned in the community like everyone else, worked at the store and chatted with customers all day. As a kid I never even thought of him being any different, he just could't hear or speak and so had his own language.
I' actually really thankful for that being part of my life, not only do I think it was really great to see how a language had developed where there was none, I never could hope for a better lesson in tolerance.
Hmm, no new conservative attacks on that statement? Seems like just 6 months ago a rabid neo-con would have stridently attacked you for daring to have that statement in your sig.
On last Friday's Science Friday program they covered this topic.
Science Friday
TOTN Audio
Studies like this have an important impact on learning why children have learning disabilities. This one imparticular has had some very serious positive impact.
The fact that the birds tend to learn physical skills followed by language skills the same as normal children do suggest a lot about the development of not just language, but the integration of language as a whole into the learning experience (for certain animals and humans).
Whether or not the children in this study were tainted by a knowledge of gestures from an outside source, the study is important for the development of language skills. It would be interesting to know what adult contact they had in the beginning of the group, as I am sure (from being a parent amongst parents) that they would have received some signing skills there. Think of how most adults communicate with their pets. Signs and words.
Unfortunately, it does appear that (see post here) the results are interpreted in an interesting manner to fulfill some peoples' individual goals for research and such. I hope that continuous peer review sheds more light on these interesting theories.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
So I see.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
But does this here new language have Pirate Slang? If not they'll never be good ship-mates. Arrr.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
True.
Thunderously true, but unfortunately not restricted to psychologists, is it? Only the High Priest speaks Latin, so only he can speak to god, and we'd all better listen.
Concerning the lack of progress - well perhaps. I've noticed the proliferation of 'grief counselors' descending on every scene of traumatic death like ambulance chasing crows - especially schools. Grump.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
I realize this is tangential to the article.... But the world-wide deaf community really lost out... They had the opportunity to create a global sign language (with local modifications of course) but no, we have ASL, GSL, ISL, one-finger spelling, etc... A global sign-language would have become the defacto cross-cultural communication method and ultimately, it wouldn't be quite so much a pain in the ass to live in a world dominated by the hearing. I took an ASL course and practiced a fair bit. I taught my 8 month old (now 3 years) ASL. For 6 months, that was his principal method of communication... An 8 month old that can ask for more milk is an impressive thing.
Actually, since GP was written in a language the poster has obviously developed on his/her own, we cannot know for certain that it is either offtopic or funny. For all we know it could be informative or just flaimbait
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
"...proliferation of 'grief counselors' descending..."
I would not describe a plague of locusts as "progress", but rather, a pestilence from Hell.
"When the country's first school for the deaf was established in 1977, children were not taught sign language but developed a system of signs to communicate."
So if the *children* were the ones to develop the language, I can see it must have been driven by the need to communicate in some way, since the school didnt teach how to communicate. But I gotta wonder - just what were the teachers doing during the months (or more?) where no one could talk to each other?
Is that you?
I do believe that this is NOT the first time it has happened, however since its 17 years since I sat in a Linguistics and CogSci lecture I can't remember the details of the example I have to admit. I do remember the _point_ of the example given however - in the context of debating whether language is indeed an intrinsic phenomenon, as proposed by Chomsky (yes, in addition to his political rants he is/was actually a cognitive scientist at one time).
they will not necessarily come. I seem to remember that Esperanto would displace all of the world's languages. A language needs to be promoted by a dominant culture (think Latin for the Romans or modern English) to become reasonably pervasive.
Drunk people have been doing this for years...
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
A new system of sign language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua may hold clues about the evolution of languages. When the country's first school for the deaf was established in 1977, children were not taught sign language but developed a system of signs to communicate. That method of communicating now shows similarities to other languages, researchers say in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
---
THEY ARE STEALING OUR INTELLECTUALL PR0pERty RiGHTz0RZ!!!!! THey aRE USiNG teH PROpRIeTARY C0dE!!
This is roughly akin to saying the human brain, as wetware, comes with language ROMs pre-assembled and built in, which was Noam Chomsky's There-Oughta-Be-A-Nobel-Prize-For-This assertion thirty years ago. Watch, though. The Sapir Whorf nazis will be along any minute now to assert that's what's happening is really language acquisition driven by cultural factors hitherto unrecognized. SWH idiots believe human language transcends the gross material world and descends (as culture) from spiritual heights. Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, was (is, really) a materialist reductionist commie who got it right: Language really did evolve in the larynxes of singing apes 12 million years ago, and is innate.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The AP story linked in the article isn't particularly informative. It picked up on the old features of the story. Linguists have been studying Nicaraguan Sign Language for over a decade now. The interesting thing about NSL is that older signers use it as a pidgen (no consistent grammar), but younger signers use it as a creole (i.e., they have created a fully-formed language with consistent grammatical structures.) This transition point has generally passed by the time scientists get around to studying the language. This story from the economist: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm? story_id=2441743
gives more details of the actual study, which apparently involves some tests of syntactic ability in older signers in comparison to younger ones. It's not ground-breaking stuff, but it does help fill out the big picture.
Because the question is not necessarily whether language learning is innate to human beings, but whether (as Chomsky argued) this innateness means that there is a Universal Grammer pre-programmed into the human brain that underlies all actual spoken/written languages.
You can believe that humans have the innate ability to learn language without believing that this learning amounts to bringing to light a structure that pre-exists in the brain. For example (some have argued) that what is really innate in children is the general ability to move inductively from samples of a language to a set of rules for producing correct (grammatical)strings in that language. Quite a different thing.
I bet you didn't know that there are way too many regional dialect of American Sign Language.
Most animated ones are the one-hander New York/NJ (it isn't the Bronx, thats for sure) dialect of which the signer keeps one hand in their pocket and conduct the entire conversation with their other hand. It was cool for a veteran ASL to STILL be able to understand them flawlessly without a hitch.
Studies have been made to show that environment is a largest driven factor in the development of sign language, followed by personality.
Naval SEAL also developed their own dialect as well to conduct underwater missions (demo anyone?)
Various elite US Army and Marine has their own as well (team-snipers, recon).
Iowan Deaf farmers also have their own structure that is closer to English syntax (as opposed to the usual French grammer, verb first, subject last). Some of you in Deaf Studies academic circles will quickly surmise that this is PSE (Pigeon Signed English) but I assured you, that is far from it.
The most disserviced group of the ASL community are some department heads of languages at various universities who are clueless to enforce a god-like edict to implement PSE as their main driving force for teach such a broken and stunted language to our deaf children. The correct language is ASL. Not Exact English, not PSE. We don't teach Ebonic to Black children, thus we shouldn't teach anything but ASL to Deaf children.
Dipolmatic Deaf corps also have their own nuances to ensure a smoother dialoge and less misunderstanding across international borders. That language is called G.... guess anyone?
Personalized is just another subset under regional dialect.
It gets more interesting as you travel from one microsociety to another.
Try it! You'll never know that it may save your life. The US Army/Navy/Marine can't be wrong.
Man, I'm truly amazed at the amount of freakin' ignorance there is about the Deaf and Deaf culture. (I'm not an expert, just worked several years on my American Sign Language and have a wife who worked on her masters in anthropology with a slant towards communication).
o Deaf children of hearing parents will frequently create home signs to communicate to their parents.
o Human beings are hard wired for language.
o Creation of an informal language (hey, like slang!) to be used amongst others is neither new (my wife studied her masters in the 80's) nor "surprising". Apparently it is "news" because the children were Deaf (which DOESN'T make them stupid!).
BTW American Sign Languange is a great language to learn. Very expressive. There is slang the kids use, jokes that TRULY don't translate into English, and a whole culture that is the same yet very different from the Hearing.
And most of them HATE these stupid stories about "those amazing Deaf people".
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
As others have already pointed out, this case is given a good treatment in Steven Pinkers very readable book THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT.
In the study of langauge acquisition there is the fact that language is underdetermined. Also called the poverty-of-stimulus arguement. Basically, the input that a child is presented with is not enough to "teach" them the langauge. This fact was noted by Noam Chomsky, from which he came up with the influential Universal Grammar theory. Steven Pinker expands on this and adds in a twist - that langauge is something evolved (like the trunk on an elephant is an evolutionary feature). Basically they claim that there is a langauge module in the brain.
Chomsky has updated his theory and lots of others (people in pure linguistics, applied linguistics, cognitive theory, second language acquistion researchers etc) have extended his work. If I remember correctly, the basic take on the theory these days is that there are principles and parameter of language syntax that are thought to be innately present in the brain. (I am doing research right now looking for evidence of UG in language acquisition.)
The case of the children in Nicaragua is old news .... but it IS used as an arguement for the presence of Universal Grammar. The langauge did NOT (as a poster above gushed) "appear out of thin air". Those kids did have some exposure to a pidgen sign langauge used by parents (not a full language). This is akin to the spoken-language phenomena whereby language goes from being a pidgen ... to a creole (fully syntactic langauge). This has happened many times in many places (Hawaii for example). The people in the universal (or generative) grammar camp say that grammar (principles) are in the brain, so language WILL develop unless actively prevented. (There are cases of that too - like a girl named Genie who was kept locked up for 13 years or so .... and could never become fluent after.)
When he started trying to communicate with them, he noticed that they had already developed a method of communicating with their hands, which he developed into a more consistent language with a slightly richer vocabulary called French Sign Language. Eventually, he opened a school for the deaf. Rich Americans sent their deaf kids there, and local (French) deaf kids attended for free. Eventually, a school was opened in the US, and the language was imported (I believe the original Gallaudet had something to do with it).
One of the interesting things about ASL is how dynamic it is. Phrases and names (i.e., "Joe") can be assigned to gestures by the user as they speak, much like a macro or a
There is *no* hype - languague is a natural instinct for humans
Yeah, but people who aren't deaf use a rudimentary system of signs and gesture when communicating. So its not like they had to come up with the concept of sign language, which the blurb sorta implies. If you're part of human society, you have examples of languages presented to your language-absorbing brain every day.
Anyway, every generation of teenagers invents its own language variant. This is certainly interresting, but I do think there's some hyping going on.
You can't take the sky from me...
An 8 month old that can ask for more milk is an impressive thing.
:)
My baby, (not yet 8 month old) can crawl to backup nursing botle when the current one is finished.
Isn't that impressive?
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
Before the Parent gets flamed for this, I should point out a key syntax choice here. There are also many diverse subgroups within the deaf community, one of which is the Deaf (capital D) subgroup. Members of this group tend to be particularly oriented on ASL as a means of communication. Most people incorrectly assume the Deaf subgroup represents all members of the deaf population since it is very vocal (figuratively speaking) and highly visible.
Worth noting is that there are other subgroups in the deaf population who favor other educational and communication options; e.g., oral (speech and lipreading), aural (speech and residual hearing supplemented by lipreading), cued speech (like aural and oral, but with signs near the mouth for clarification of hard to distinguish phonemes), Signed English (sign, but in the syntax of english), etc. Some of these subgroups are so integrated into the mainstream society that those around them may not even realize they are deaf.
An additional point of clarification: ASL is definitely not english. The syntax is rather different, thus leading to the occasional moment of confusion when communicating in written english. This sometimes propagates the stereotype that all people who are deaf have lower reading skills.
Pirate slang like "serialz" and "0-day"?
apple can already be a verb. Or, it used to be a verb in 1913...
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):
Apple \Ap"ple\ ([a^]p"p'l), v. i.
To grow like an apple; to bear apples. --Holland.
Now, it would be mighty strange to say I apple,
as I don't believe I can bear fruit...
How about turning, "book" into a verb? Oh, wait... "Book him, charlie!"
How about mango?
First of all, I attend RIT (but am not deaf myself), with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf right there on campus, so I have interacted with actual deaf people, and do so on a daily basis in one way or another. I did IT work at NTID last summer with a deaf co-worker, and he was one of the most fun people to be around that i've met in a long time.
That said:
Man, I'm truly amazed at the amount of freakin' ignorance there is about the Deaf and Deaf culture.
Then the deaf need to get out and educate the rest of the world, and interact with the rest of us that can hear. Many (but by no means all) deaf people i've seen tend to stick to themselves and not communicate much with the hearing in their daily lives.
One good example would be in many classes where i've had group projects, the deaf/hard-of-hearing students will almost always (unless the professor forces them to split up) stick together instead of dealing with the hassle of communicating with the non-deaf classmates.
because the children were Deaf (which DOESN'T make them stupid!)
I've not run into someone with this attitude for a long, long time, even before I started attending RIT. I'd be interested to hear you expand on where this has been a problem for you.
For example, say I am signing about Alice and Bob. Whenever I make a comment about Alice, I do it with my hand down by my left hip. Whenever I make a comment about Bob, I do it with my hand up by my right shoulder. Having established the convention that "down by my left hip" means Alice and "up by my right shoulder" means Bob, I can sign the sentence "Alice hits Bob" by simply making the sign for "hits" as I move my hand from my left hip up to my right shoulder. I don't need to explicitly sign the words Alice or Bob because the spatial movement of my hand codes the subject and object.
This is something that doesn't exist in spoken language. The closest analogy would be reading dialogue, and using a different tone of voice for each character. Where this analogy falls short is that we would never change the pitch of our voice while speaking to imply an action.
(I originally came across this in a Scientific American article some years ago in which researchers were studying whether Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia existed in deaf speakers.)
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
"I see," said the blind man to his deaf wife who heard their no-legged son walking up the stairs.
--
"I see," said the blind man peeing into the wind, "It's all coming back to me now."
Besides, this isn't new or anything. Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works both explain why this is not only normal, but if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be here to wax idiotically about it on Slashdot.
(Note: I didn't RTFA, but I am in linguistics and I have read articles on this subject before.)
I don't think you understand the point.
There had been no systematic education of deaf children in Nicaragua prior to 1979. At that point, they sent all of the deaf children in the country to two schools in Managua. Though all of the kids had some rudimentary signs that had been developed independently within each of their families, they did not have a language, really. They had gestures for communication without syntax.
Though attempts were made to teach these kids spanish finger-spelling (which for various reasons is not regarded as an actual sign language) none were successful. And yet, the teachers saw blatant communication going on between the children: they had adapted signs into a system which they all understood to varying degrees.
The interesting thing, though, was that whereas the older children, who had gone longer without having access to a linguistically-rich environment rarely linked more than a few signs together and showed only a rudimentary syntax (their signing has been categorized as a "pidgin"), the younger children's language evolved into something much more complex. The language they use includes the use of agreement between subject and object (it has something to do with the placement of the signs in space relative to eachother. I am no expert on sign language, but this is apparently something demonstrated by all other sign languages.)
The point is that, whereas the older children, who had passed out of their language-acquisition period, spoke in a manner which could almost be compared to the signing of chimps (even if that sounds horrible and the claims of language in non-human primates are dubious), the younger children created a generative, varied system which included a rule-based system of grammar. So whereas the older kids would be limited to sentences like, "pour coffee," the younger ones would be able to create ones like "Damn it, I shouldn't have stayed out all last night partying because now I have to stay up and study. Pour me a cup of coffee, would you?"
So no, they didn't have to come up with the concept of a sign language, but they did have to come up with the rules from scratch. It's nothing like the fact that teenagers create their own slang.
I'm not deaf, but I have been exposed to the community a certain amount (I wear hearing aids, so I participated in a panel for parents of deaf/hard-of-hearing kids, and I've taken ASL classes). So I am somewhat familiar with these frustrations, as well as the prejudices that some deaf people have against hearing aid users.
I also have a non-hearing-related physical disability. Trust me, *all* of us are sick of "those amazing disabled people" stories.
IAACPL (I Am A Computational Psycho Linguist)
Influential though Chomky may have been, the general form of UG (as you so appropriately put it: "Basically they claim that there is a langauge module in the brain.") is not really his (Broca, Wernicke, anyone?). His and his followers' are the claims about pretty specific parameters and principles, which are a lot harder to prove and can obviously not be determined from such general data (and which I don't expect anyone to find either, but that's another story).
Yup, I've had a lot of interaction as well. I'd go into it, but let's cut to the chase and just pull out a ruler and measure.
Many (but by no means all) deaf people i've seen tend to stick to themselves and not communicate much with the hearing in their daily lives.
Much like those who speak Chinese gravitate to other Chinese speakers, those who speak German gravitate to others who speak German, etc. Hmmm, I think I see a pattern here...
It is very human to want to be in association with a group of people like yourself. People who don't have to go out of their way to communicate with you.
What you are arguing is that the Deaf are to be faulted for being human.
I've not run into someone with this attitude for a long, long time, even before I started attending RIT. I'd be interested to hear you expand on where this has been a problem for you.
Come to Texas. or hell, anywhere in the South. You'll find that attitude quite common. One man I knew used to tell me how when folks would ask him how he could drive he would point out that its his ears that don't work, not his eyes.
Not everywhere is as utopian as New York state.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Dang, yesterday I had mod points but used them all up on post of relatively little value compared to yours. I majored in linguistics myself, but then went back into IT a few years after graduating (I'd been working in IT for some years before going go college, and majored in linguistics because I loved it; however, it just didn't pay very well and competition was fierce, so I'm back in IT).
The parent hits the nail on the head with his/her summary: these kids didn't make variations on an existing language, they developed a pidgin, which was creolized by the younger kids coming in, and soon developed into a full-blown language of its own.
Things like this are attested in the literature, of course. I recall reading an account of a pair of (hearing) twins who developed a language of their own. I'm not talking about the secret words from some things that we all have as children and typically share with our siblings of near age, but a full-blown language. They could speak it all day long and no one else in the world understood it.
ASL was devloped from French Sign Language.
It still shares about 70%
open4free ©
Does this story remind anybody else of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome?
It is very human to want to be in association with a group of people like yourself. People who don't have to go out of their way to communicate with you.
:)
What you are arguing is that the Deaf are to be faulted for being human.
Not at all. What i'm arguing is that if there's a frustration at the ignorance of their culture, then it seems that the deaf need to share that culture with the rest of us in daily life, not stay clustered by themselves constantly. If you have a way for people to really understand deaf culture without actually interacting with the deaf, i'd love to hear it, seriously. My personal experience is that things like online chat rooms and such can help immensely in breaking the ice.
At any rate, there's probably a fine line to walk there somewhere, but i'm not an expert, so i'll leave that to people like you and your wife.
Not everywhere is as utopian as New York state
I wouldn't exactly call NY state "utopian", but at any rate, that is why I asked
We might not change the pitch of our voice to imply an action, but we change it to imply many other things - emotion, truth, etc. However, its harder to use pitch to imply a transition - at least over a single word. Over a sentence, you could go from (e.g.) high pitched to low pitched to convey going from happy to sad, or from Alice to Bob. And although I guess you could use the same spatial connection mechanism to give an emotional or tonal convention to locations of your hands, I don't exactly see that as being as common as the use of tonality to convey meaning in spoken language.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Depends on the point of view I suppose. The carrion bird thought Greeks chained to rocks made nice snacks, while Prometheus......
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
Whenever two languages clash so that communication is required, the adults will develop a simple pigden from the host languages w/o much grammar. However their own children will convert it into a creole of the same words w/ a complex and sometimes unique grammar.
This can be used as an explanation for the common splitting and re-development well-known in the language tree.
The second example is always based on citing Derek Bickerton's work on Hawaiian Pidgin English-- which not only has been regarded by creolists as being fundamentally flawed since it came out; recently it has been all but refuted by a former student of his who made an extensive documentary archive of written sources of the language from 1850 to 1950, and established clearly that it didn't emerge like he says at all.
In short, we just don't know how sign languages and creoles come into existence, and anybody who says otherwise is trying to fool you; especially if said person says it in a book for non-linguists which systemtatically excludes or distorts results that contradict what they want you to believe (i.e., Pinker).
Are you adequate?
This is using the example selectively to support their biases. One example of the sort of thing they downplay: the role that bringing these kids together into a community plays. Chomsky's model of language acquisition is strictly individualistic: the infant witnesses "primary linguistic data" (the speech in an adult community), and the appropriate pieces of PLD trigger various innate cognitive mechanisms for language acquisition. This is modeled as a strictly individualistic process.
The thing with the Nicaraguan Sign Language examples (and with the pidgin and creole examples in general) is that, while that is (for reasons I won't discuss) not all that good of a model of how a child learns language in a community with an established adult language they have access to, it is far worse as a model for a community where the children don't have access to such a language. What's needed is a more dynamic, community based model, where the interactions between a bunch of kids who don't have any language nor access to another one create a feedback loop and converge into a single language.
Anecdote: I once asked of a Chomskian who was ranting about creoles to tell me how Chomsky's acquisition model accounts for the fact that the children in one of these creole genesis scenarios end up speaking the same language, and not widely different ones. He said "because they all receive the same input". At this point, a sociolinguist in the room immediately got it, and retorted: "Yeah, every single one of them, locked up individually in their own room". (This sort of thing is usually called "missing the forest for the trees".)
Are you adequate?
my psych textbook tells about this
There is some suggestion that the stimulus may not be so poor and that young infants are sensitive to these structural regularities. Read some of the work of T. Mintz (UCSD) and R. L. Gomez (U. Arizona or John Hopkins?) in the past 4 years if you aren't already familiar with them.
and not just cross-cultural...think how useful it would b in a loud bar;-)
and it could eliminate the problem of people chattering thru a movie...
originally from the NYT.
So much for speculation about brain size. Dolphins are far from chimps in the evolution charts, and birds, whose brains are the size of a nut, don't have any part of a "neocortex" at all.
... had an opportunity to create a global verbal language too, but did we use it?
Hey, it's never too late!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
L.A.D. = Language Acquisition Device, a physical brain structure that Noam Chomsky postulated exists and means that all human children develop a language, whether taught or not.
Nim Chimsky = name of a research primate used to prove a lot of language acquisition experiments, named after Noam Chomsky.
This story was in the news in the 1990s. Typical slashdot ignorance.
the article is totaly dumb. The mentioned theory about "basic traits of all languages are hard-wired in the human brain" have been reject centuries ago.
anyone with a clue (wich is NOT the case with journalists) knows that the language developed by these kids only show that deaf people can be influenced by gestures and signs generated by non-deaf people. period.
that reminds me of a history of luis some-roman-numeral that confinated some dozen childrens from every human contact to see if they will grow up speaking english, german or french... languages are hard-wired in the human brain my ass. go back to school you associated press journalist.
See also A Linguistic Big Bang, from The NY Times Magazine, five years back.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Sorry. Sports signs lacks the following criteria to consist of a language:
syntax
ruleset
a robust vocabulary to cover most environment
a community to support this (existing or not).
Latin meets that criteria, zebras do not.
Is it protected by GPL, GNU, CopyLeft, creative commons?
Will it withstand subversion attempts by microsoft (lowercasing/deprecation of ms intentional/perpetual), sco, or furthermore?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Well, you may be right for all I know. But if you're going to waste enough of your time to post the above vitriol, you may as well post some sources. Got any?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Drunken "sailors" signing to each other isn't a security breach on the listener's part.
i'm not an expert, so i'll leave that to people like you and your wife
Don't rightly recall ever saying I was an expert. Merely expressed an opinion.
The Hearing think about Deaf culture as much as Americans think about Canadian or Mexican politics - pretty much 0%. It is out there, we just don't consider it as important.
Merely personal observation and nothing more.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV