LL-L "In the media" 2005.02.26 (04) [E]

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From:  R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: In the media


DEAF PEOPLE ARE MAKING A PROFOUND CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

Economist.com — March 2004

Just as biologists rarely see a new species arise, linguists rarely see a
new language being born. You have to be in the right place at the right
time, which usually you are not. But the past few decades have seen an
exception. Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new
language in Nicaragua. The catch is that it is not a spoken language but,
rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children. Ann
Senghas, of Columbia University, in New York, one of the linguists who has
been studying this language, told the AAAS conference in Seattle about her
discoveries. And Susan Goldin-Meadow, of the University of Chicago, who
studies the spontaneous emergence of signing in deaf children, filled in the
background by showing how such children use hand signals in a different way
from everybody else.

The thing that makes language different from other means of communication is
that it is made of units that can be combined in different orders to create
different meanings. In a spoken language these units are words. In a sign
language these units are gestures. Dr Senghas has been studying the way
those gestures have evolved in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).

The language emerged in the late 1970s, at a new school for deaf children.
Initially the children were instructed by teachers who could hear. No one
taught them how to sign; they simply worked it out for themselves. By
conducting experiments on people who attended the school at various points
in its history, Dr Senghas has shown how NSL has become more sophisticated
over time. For example, concepts that an older signer uses a single sign
for, such as rolling and falling, have been unpacked into separate signs by
youngsters.

Early users, too, did not develop a way of distinguishing left from right.
Dr Senghas showed this by asking signers of different ages to converse about
a set of photographs that each could see. One signer had to pick a
photograph and describe it. The other had to guess which photograph was
being described.

When all the photographs contained the same elements, merely arranged
differently, older people, who had learned the early form of the language,
could neither signal which photo they meant, nor understand the signals of
their younger partners. Nor could their younger partners teach them the
signs that indicate left and right. The older people clearly understood the
concept of left and right, they just could not converse about it‹a result
that bears on the vexing question of how much language merely reflects the
way the brain thinks about the world, and how much it actually shapes such
thinking.

For a sign language to emerge spontaneously, though, deaf children must have
some inherent tendency to tie gestures to meaning. Spoken language, of
course, is frequently accompanied by gestures. But, as a young researcher,
Dr Goldin-Meadow suspected that deaf children use gestures differently from
those who can hear. In a 30-year-long project carried out on deaf children
in America and Taiwan, whose parents can hear normally, she has shown that
this is true.

Even deaf children who have no deaf acquaintances use signs as words. The
order the signs come in is important. It is also different from the order of
words in either English or Chinese. But it is the same, for a given set of
signs and meanings, in both America and Taiwan.

Curiously enough, the signs produced by children in Spain and Turkey, whom
Dr Goldin-Meadow is also studying, while similar to each other, differ from
those that American and Taiwanese children produce. Dr Goldin-Meadow is not
certain why that is. However, the key commonality is that their
spontaneously created languages resemble fully-formed languages.

That result, if confirmed in other studies, could have profound
implications. Another much-argued question in linguistics is whether there
is some sort of grammatical template that acts as part of a language
instinct and is wired into the brains of new-born children. Such a template
would help a child to learn a language quickly. But the different grammars
of actual languages suggest it cannot, assuming it does exist, be imposing
itself too strongly. However, the sign languages of Dr Goldin-Meadow's
children are entirely self-invented. If there is a deep structure, they are
surely drawing on it directly. The order of their signs may thus be a direct
reflection of what that structure is. For now, Dr Goldin-Meadow is cautious.
But it may turn out that the truth comes not out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings, but from their hands.



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