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Would anyone consider this a natural sign language?
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Source:The New York Times > Science > Deaf Children's Ad Hoc Language Evolves and Instructs
Deaf Children's Ad Hoc Language Evolves and Instructs
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 21, 2004
A deep insight into how the brain learns language has emerged from the study of Nicaraguan sign language, invented by deaf children in a Nicaraguan school as a means of communicating among themselves. The finding suggests that the brain naturally breaks complex concepts into smaller components, indicating a dedicated neural machinery for language.
The Nicaraguan children are well known to linguists because they provide an apparently unique example of people inventing a language from scratch. The phenomenon started at a school for special education founded in 1977 by Hope Somoza, the wife of the Nicaraguan dictator, and later expanded by the Sandinista government. Instructors noticed that the deaf children, while absorbing little from their Spanish lessons, had developed a system of signs for talking to one another. As one generation of children taught the system to the next, it has evolved from a set of gestures into a far more sophisticated form of communication, and today's 800 users of the language provide a living history of its stages of formation.
The children have been studied principally by Dr. Judy Kegl, a linguist at the University of Southern Maine, and by Dr. Ann Senghas, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University. In the latest study, published in the current issue of Science, Dr. Senghas shows that the younger children have now decomposed certain gestures into smaller component signs. A hearing person asked to mime a standard story about a cat waddling down a street will make a single gesture, a downward spiral motion of the hand. But the deaf children have developed two different signs to use in its place. They first sign a circle for the rolling motion and then a straight line for the direction of movement.
This requires more signing, but the two signs can be used in combination with others to express different concepts. The development is of interest to linguists because it captures a principal quality of human language - discrete elements usable in different combinations - in contrast to the one sound, one meaning of animal communication. "The regularity she documents here - mapping discrete aspects of the world onto discrete word choices - is one of the most distinctive properties of human language," said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard.
When people with no common language are thrown into contact, they often develop an ad hoc language known to linguists as a pidgin, usually derived from one of the parent languages. Pidgins are rudimentary systems with minimal grammar and utterances of the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" variety. But in a generation or two the pidgins acquire grammar and somehow become upgraded into what linguists call creoles.
Though many new languages have been created by the pidgin-creole route, the Nicaraguan situation is unique, Dr. Senghas said, because its starting point was not a complex language but ordinary gestures. From this raw material, the deaf children appear to be spontaneously fabricating the elements of language. Sign languages can possess all the properties of language, including grammar, and differ only in conveying meaning by signs instead of speech.
Until now, children's specific contribution to language has been hard to define because they end up speaking like their parents. By inventing a new language from scratch, the Nicaraguan children afford linguists the chance to identify children's role in language creation. Dr. Senghas's work shows "that children can give the language certain regularities instead of merely extracting them" from their parents' speech, Dr. Pinker said.
Linguists have been engaged in a longstanding argument as to whether there is an innate, specialized neural machinery for learning language, as proposed by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or whether everything is learned from scratch. Dr. Senghas says her finding supports the view that language learning is innate, not purely cultural, since the Nicaraguan children's disaggregation of gestures appears to be spontaneous. Her result also upholds the idea that children play an important part in converting a pidgin to a creole. Because children's minds are primed to learn the rules of grammar, it is thought, they spontaneously impose grammatical structure on a pidgin that doesn't have one. Creoles often possess grammatical features that do not occur in the parent languages of the pidgin; the children of pidgin speakers are presumably the source of these innovations.
Though there are many creoles, the transition from pidgin to creole has rarely, if ever, been captured in real time, though it has been reconstructed to some extent by interviewing older people. The Nicaraguan children are a living laboratory of language generation. Dr. Senghas, who has been visiting their school every year since 1990, said she had noticed how the signs for numbers have developed. Originally the children represented "20" by flicking the fingers of both hands in the air twice. But this cumbersome sign has been replaced with a form that can now be signed with one hand. The children don't care that the new sign doesn't look like a 20, Dr. Senghas said; they just want a symbol that can be signed fast.
