Ann Senghas
We all speak smile
Posted on 02/21/2004 6:37:52 AM PST by Pharmboy
Deaf people are making a profound contribution to the study of language
Ann Senghas
We all speak smile
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.
Interesting, I pick up Bateson's Steps To An Ecology Of Mind, and here in the thesis "Redundancy And Coding" is the following:
"I suggest that this separate burgeoning evolution of kinesics and paralanguage alongside the evolution of verbal language indicates that our iconic communication servers functions totally different from those of language and, indeed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform."
Bateson's main argument is that kinesic and verbal communications exist independently for the sake of redundancy.
Gestural communication is used widely as a supplement to verbal communication, although most of the time you don't notice it. As an Italian, I tend to "speak with my hands" a lot.
The ability to communicate with gestures and hand signals would have been valuable to early hunters (to avoid being heard by the hunted) and is in use today in the military (hand and arm signals to silently communicate things like "danger ahead", "take cover", etc)
Note: this topic is from 2/21/2004. Thanks Pharmboy.
Nahh, they are just deaf, not dumb...
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