Kids Give Language its Shape (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Kids Give Language its Shape

By Serena Gordon, HealthDay Reporter
http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/2/2004/09/17/story004.html

HealthDayNews -- Children's brains are hard-wired to learn languages
and, in some cases, to improve upon them.

That's the conclusion of a new study that followed several generations
of deaf Nicaraguan children as they created their own sign language and
then continuously tinkered it with each new group of signers.

"These children are actually creating language. This was a rare
opportunity to discover a new language as it's emerging," said study
author Ann Senghas, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard
College of Columbia University in New York City.

As each generation learned the sign language, they modified it. The more
they changed the original "Nicaraguan Sign Language" (NSL), the more
its rules and structure resembled those of other languages, the
researchers found.

"From early on, from the first time the language was passed down to a
new group of child learners, this language showed evidence of certain
fundamental, universal hallmarks of language: discrete elements and
hierarchal structure," explained study co-author Sotaro Kita, a senior
lecturer in the department of experimental psychology at the University
of Bristol in England.

"These hallmarks that are observed in all languages of the world arose
once a communication system is learned, as a language, by children.
Thus, core fundamentals of language can emerge out of children's
learning abilities," Kita said.

The study appears in the Sept. 17 issue of Science.

Before 1977, most deaf people in Nicaragua were kept at home and didn't
have contact with other deaf people. In 1977, a special education
elementary school was opened, and about 50 deaf children attended. In
1981, a vocational school attended by about 200 deaf children opened.
The children also began to socialize after school.

The schools taught the children in Spanish, with limited success.
However, as they began to spend more and more time together, the
modified sign language developed.

Today, about 800 deaf Nicaraguans, aged 4 to 45 years old, use the sign
language. For this study, Senghas, Kita and colleague Asly Ozyurek from
the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands recruited 30 deaf people of
various ages. They then split the group evenly into three subgroups.
The first learned to sign before 1984, the second from 1984 to 1993 and
the third group learned to sign after 1993. All of the children had
been using NSL since they were at least 6 years old. The researchers
also compared the sign language to gestures used by hearing
individuals.

The study volunteers were shown a cartoon of a cat swallowing a bowling
ball and then rolling down a hill in a wobbly manner. All of the
hearing people and most of the first group of signers described the
event by making a simultaneous gesture. But the children from the
second and third groups generally described the event by breaking it
down into its separate parts -- rolling, wobbling and downhill -- and
then expressed those thoughts individually.

"This study truly illustrates the essential properties to language,"
said Michael Siegal, a professor of psychology at the University of
Sheffield, in England. He wrote an accompanying editorial about the
study.

"Once children are provided with a language community, they
spontaneously create language -- either sign or spoken -- in terms of
elements that meaningfully represent events in the world around them.
They break down and segment a sequence that can then be embedded within
another sequence to form meaningful propositions," he said.

Senghas said the ability to learn and improve upon language is something
people lose as they get older. Each generation of signers passed down
the language, but it was the younger children who changed it, making it
more language-like.

"Humans lose the capacity to create the core fundamentals of language as
they age," concurred Kita.

Another important finding of the study is how important social
interaction is to the development of language, Senghas said.

It is a central motivation or instinct for humans to create language
spontaneously as part of their culture, and early access to a language
underscores effective communication," Siegal added.