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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?"
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.
This phenomenon is so common that such languages have a name: Creole.
The old Lingua Franca was on the verge of becoming such a creole language before being superceded by the Lingua Francais, and there are a number of creoles spoken by millions, such as Swahili.
Or English.
KFG
Besides, the "official" sign language was invented pretty much the same way, IIRC.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
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).
There is no "official" sign language. There is American Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, British Sign Language, and any number of other sign languages. Much of American Sign Language actually came from France.
(Interesting side note for some: The manual alphabet used by Yanks differs from that used by the Brits and Aussies.)
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.
no one has ever rigorously established that none of the kids had any prior exposure to sign language.
And how exactly would one rigorously establish this? Follow the kids around with a camera from birth to make sure no-one signs around them?
First of all, we need to make clear that there is no such thing as "sign language". Rather, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different sign languages, originating wherever there are deaf communities. Secondly, in Nicaragua at the time the schools for the deaf were prohibited from teaching any of the existing sign languages, since it was believed that the deaf should learn to read lips so that they could communicate "normally". This was of course a rousing failure, since so many different phonemes look the same when reading lips. I can imagine this problem is particularly prominent with Spanish, given its relatively small number of vowel sounds compared to English and its lack of the English tendency to close off vowel sounds with a telltale rounding of the lips.
Anyway, since they weren't able to communicate at all via lip-read Spanish, these children needed some means to communicate with each other and with their parents. It is true that sometimes these children would learn a few pantomimed gestures from their parents, but this is not the same thing as a signed language-- first, because none of the pantomime gestures necessarily resemble any of the accepted symbols in an existing sign language, and second, because these were only a few individual signs with no overriding structure. Claiming these children learned a "sign language" from their parents would be like claiming my dog knows English. Furthermore, prior to the reforms which led to the schools of the deaf being founded in Nicaragua, deafness was attached a social stigma. Deaf children were kept isolated from the rest of society and treated as if they were mentally incompetent, with no attempts being made to teach them.
At any rate, the most any one deaf child was likely to learn were a few made-up gestures, and these were unique to each deaf individual and his or her family, since before the opening of the schools for the deaf the deaf children had no opportunity to socialize with one another. When the deaf schools did open, the children forged their own pidgin out of the few gestures they knew, making up more symbols of their own. When this pidgin was passed to new students below the critical age for language learning, it became a fully grammatical language, a creole.
The symbols and structure of Nicaraguan Sign Language are different enough from those of other sign languages, and the opportunity for the children to be exposed to them is small enough, that it is extremely unlikely that other signed languages contributed any role to the formation of NSL.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
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.
japh = just another perl hacker
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
First, ebonics is entirely different. Again, the people who are forming it have exposure to other language. The kids in Nicaragua didn't. The couldn't hear, and no one knew any signing.
Second, I just wanna comment on Ebonics a little, since it is so often derided (I can't tell if you mean it like that here). It makes more sense that it appears. "Ask" being pronounced as "ax" isn't too far fetched; we truncate consonant clusters all the time.
Read the following aloud: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. Now, when you read "fifth", did you actually say fif-th, or did you pronounce it "fith". "fth" is virtually NEVER said in its entirety.
Second, the "he be" example is actually something I wish was in common use. It is NOT simply a drop in replacement for "he is". It's called the "habitual be", and means that the statement is true over a much wider range than "is" entails.
For instance, "he is down at the park" in standard and common English means that right now, his location coincides with the location of the park. "He be down at the park" by contrast means that not only is he at the park now, but that he tends to hang out there a lot.
So this type of study not only has been done in the past, it has been done enough times to notice definite similarities.
(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.
The older kids had each had a "home sign" which they developed with their parents; each different, without grammar, small vocabulary. From these they formed a pidgin at school, and the younger kids learned it as a creole. The novel thing is that there weren't any fully-formed languages that this creole was descended from. Usually, a pidgin is formed by a group of fluent speakers of different languages.
Aside from this data, it would be theoretically possible that all languages have common features because they are all in some way derived from languages that have those features. But these children weren't exposed to any language with UG, and developed a language with UG.