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?"

Comments

Not the first time this has happened

[dangerz]

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.

Re:Not the first time this has happened

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to remember that this is how American Sign Language (ASL) was invented, from the dorm room of a bunch of kids who were deemed non-communitive. Signed Exact English (SEE) and pidgeon (slang) evolved from ASL.

The only thing I see that makes this newsworthy is that people are learning from the process these kids went through / are going through. That didn't happen when ASL was invented.

Check out http://www.gallaudet.edu/ and http://dhi.gallaudet.edu/

Wasn't this covered in Brenda Laurel's book?

[mveloso]

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.

Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

New Zealand sign language started under similar circumstances. Deaf children in a school simply created a way to communicate.

Don't take their word for it

[tgv]

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.

Anyway, the New Scientist article http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 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.

"Languages" are already 'personalized'

[endlessoul]

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.

Re:Wow...

[robbyjo]

Not only that, some even claims that language is human's nature and part of human evolution. The motive was that humans are social cretures. Check here for a short tutorial on "Origins of Language"

builtin roms for the wetware

[grikdog]

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.

Re:Why weren't the children taught sign language?

[CODiNE]

They were deprived of learning an existing sign language because they are deprived, not as the result of any experiment.


Ummm... no, they are a living experiment. These kids are still kept isolated from learning any foreign signs and anyone deaf who visits them is forced to wear mittens and not make any facial expressions. It's kind of sick that they aren't allowed to know anything about the outside world for the sake of someone's research project.

As for the second generation of children adding syntax and so forth, I believe this can be explained by the fact that unlike their older peers, they were not raised in an environment lacking language, and hence were able to take more advantage of those crucial first 5 years of life. It's common to meet deaf in the United States whose hearing parents didn't allow them to learn sign language, and whose mental development is permanently stunted from this... they NEVER catch up. Deaf who are exposed to language and/or other deaf at an early age flourish.

Isolated deaf are actually common throughout the world... roughly 90% of deaf children have hearing parents, many of whom think their children are retarded and basically leave them at home 24/7 until it's time to go to 1st grade. And guess what... they ALL have their own invented language it's called "home signs" and many of them are quite unique. Oh believe me the deaf know all about isolated communities forming languages.

P.S. My first language was sign language.

Mod parent up

[gujo-odori]

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.

But here's the problem.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The problem is that the Noam Chomskys and Steven Pinkers of the world are trying to draw extremely biased conclusions on the basis of the evidence you propose here: that "language is hard-wired into individuals" (WTF "hardwired" is supposed to mean is something they hardly ever sit down to think through clearly).

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".)

Re:But here's the problem.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Now I'm ready to hear out your explanation for how it is that a person is capable of acquiring language without having a language instinct.

This statement may sound obvious to you, but it's far from explicit. What is a language "instinct" supposed to be?

Chomsky's argument is fairly straightforward: Given a blank slate brain, a language-learner will never have sufficient language learning opportunities to learn a language, roughly because there are too many possible hypotheses to consider.

It's simple, but he did not come to believe it from experiment or testing it, but rather, because he was committed to believing it from the start. Then he and his followers set out not to test whether it was true, but to pile up evidence selectively to support it.

The classic evidence for the "poverty of the stimulus" argument has long known to be suspect, and is now known to be wrong. For example, a cornerstone of Chomsky's argument is the related claims that (a) parents hardly ever correct their children's speech and (b) when they do, children don't attend to the correction anyway. In short, this is the claim that children don't have negative evidence in learning language; nothing in their experience can indicate which utterances, among those they hear from other people and those they utter themselves, are grammatically ill-formed. Therefore, this knowledge must come from the child.

The problem is that the "evidence" cited is plain wrong. Children do get numerous cues from their parents when they utter something that's not grammatically well-formed, and they do attend to these cues. These cues don't take the crude form of the parents flat out telling the kid that they said something wrong (the basis for the old claims); the most well-know of this sort of cue is that when the child says something ungrammatical, the adult will rephrase it correctly. (See the work of Eve Clark and her students.)

Until you give an alternate explanation of how we learn language that can address the poverty of stimulus question, language as instinct is the better of the two foundations

That's a non-sequitur. "It doesn't matter if you can demonstrate that view X is nonsense, and, to boot, founded on bad evidence."

The Chomskian isn't saying that social dynamics in a speech community is unimportant, but that it does not, and cannot, explain, in of itself, how we are capable of acquiring language.

But Chomsky is on the record dismissing the social aspects of language learning. In fact, there's a more fundamental problem in that Chomsky takes for granted that "language" is a purely individual phenomenon, and that the fact that languages are spoken in communities where people communicate is merely incidental. (Chomsky has said, literally, that he doesn't believe that language is "for communication", nor that its use for this is an "interesting" fact about it.)

So, for Chomsky, "language" is, essentially and before anything else, a kind of knowledge possessed individual speaker. Contrast this with, say, Saussure, who considered language to be, essentially, a code shared by a community. Now I'm not going to claim that one of them is right and the other wrong, but let's look at the issue at hand: the emergence of languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language, where "language" is being used in a sense more like Saussure's than Chomsky's; i.e., we're talking about the emergence of a new speech community. Do you think that using an individualistic, purely psychological notion of "language" you're going to satisfy people's questions about this phenomenon?