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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?"
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
There is a big difference here. The story you relay has happened many times before all over. But andn this is a BIG BUT, the people involved already knew some language, and those rules probably influenced the language they created.
In this case, these kids knew NO LANGUAGE at ALL. They just made one up out of THIN AIR. This is a very big difference.
Seems a bit of a risk to deprive these children of learning an existing sign language just for the sake of an experiment.
They were deprived of learning an existing sign language because they are deprived, not as the result of any experiment.
Havn't you seen any of those Sally Struthers commercials?
Are they going to lock some normal Nicaraguan children up and see if they come up with a new spoken language?
Pretty much all children come up with a new spoken language. Yeah, it's based on the old one, but it comes out new. You'll understand this better when you hit 40 or 50 and find yourself walking around muttering under your breath that you don't understand a damned thing kids say these days.
Just imagine what it was like before the invention of the dictionary and standarized spelling and grammar as a somewhat stablizing force.
And we still got ebonics. The kids made it up as they went along. The professorial types then make a career out of analyzing it. Hence the invention of dictionaries and standarized spellings, but the language always comes first, then gets codified as "correct" after the fact.
The O.E.D. isn't so a much definitive reference to the English language so much as it is a biography of the language.
Or, to put it another way, a history of the way kids talk.
KFG
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.
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?).
Then why do you suppose this was published in Science?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Do you think that using an individualistic, purely psychological notion of "language" you're going to satisfy people's questions about this phenomenon?
Well, my answer is certainly going to depend on what kinds of questions these 'people' have. But I will note that if I wanted to develop a thorough and accurate model of the evolution and development of a speech community I would need to address how it is that we are able to learn (and create) languages at all. This is not trivial because the machinery in the brain that make language learning possible can very well have an enormous impact on the shapes that languages take. The individual is also the common denominator in any speech community. Though, under normal circumstances, every language user belongs to one or more speech communities, different language users may (and do) belong to different language communities. They are capable of belonging to these language communities because they are capable of learning languages. They are capable of learning languages because structures in the brain are ready to receive linguistic inputs, and place limits on the possible 'interpretations' of such inputs.
To take the individual as THE principal unit of language processing does not imply that social dynamics are unimportant factors to consider in the evolution of a speech community, or for that matter the development of a new one. Classically you I think would be a macro-linguist and Chomsky a micro-linguist, you saying language is embedded in a larger system, and Chomsky saying, look this is how the machinery of language works. Like macro-economics and micro-economics, it may be difficult to reconcile the two views, but I think that a population-thinking approach may help. On the one hand you start off with a model of individuals, and then you specify, or examine, the structure of the dynamics between those individuals, and move on from there. For example, in economics, you can design a simulation where individual agents are classical utility maximizers. Then put these individual agents in simulated situations and look for emergent properties of the system- i.e. the interaction effects of the decisions of individual agents. For the development of a language community, we would create a model of individual language learning, and then we watch how these models interact to create language communities. I think that this accomodates your concerns.
As for poverty of stimulus and parental cues, I've a number of replies. 1) First, a question: is the evidence contrary to Chomky's position cross-cultural? Is it universally true that all children who have learned a language have also had such cues? Does a Tiwi child get such feedback? 2)To say that such cues help the child mildy begs the question, since it is, in the last analysis, only another instance of input for the child to process.
I will admit that I am not terribly well versed in Chomsky's program of linguistics. It is not my field. However, I generally hold it to be true that a person with a tabla rasa brain could not possibly make any sense of the world in its lifetime. I believe, though again I'm not sure, that this has been called the grounding problem in cognitive science. How is a brain to know, without prior specifications, to know what kinds of information is relevant? With regard to language, I can imagine that such a child may mistakenly focus entirely on the tonal properties of speech when learning English- and everytime the child is corrected by the parent, instead of paying attention to the choice of words, or the order of words, it only pays attention to the the tonal properties of the correction, and tries to learn from this new input. And after every correction the child 'concludes', the problem is more subtle that I thought, I will pay closer attention.
Logic, macros, and more