Homesign, Chomsky, and Nicaragua again

Signs Support Chomsky

Marie Coppola and Elissa Newport of the University of Rochester have also jumped on the bandwagon of studying ISN (or did two years ago in 2005 when this paper came out.) The title basically says it all. They did a study on a rather small sample population, three people, who were never exposed to a real, formal sign language. They were home-signers, that is, they developed a system for use around the home with their parents and families, but were never able to learn a full language in the way that most people are. The study used little video clips of people either as "the subject" or "the topic" of an action verb, and then tested whether the people could identify the grammatical concept of a "subject." Apparently the test subjects knew to put the subject of the sentence at the beginning, as opposed to the "topic" of the sentence in a different position. This, the authors postulate, supports a Chomskian view of an innate grammar.

I don't know if Chomsky's theory of universal grammar mandates that subjects must go at the beginning of sentences, but if it does this evidence could be construed to support his theory. It does seem to make intuitive sense to me, a native English speaker, that subjects preceding verbs would be a linguistic universal. However, if one is going to take issue with the experiment, she will either seek to undermine the evidence, or refute the conclusions, and I could see how both could be done in this case. If you're a deaf person born to hearing parents who never learned and never will learn real sign language, one can imagine that your parents will develop their own signs, and those signs will probably mimic the speech patterns the parents already use, which in this case would probably be Spanish which does indeed put the subjects at the beginning of sentences, when a subject is included at all. A complexity that arises, however, is when there isn't a subject in a Spanish sentence, that is, when the subject pronoun (he, I, they, you, etc.) is implied by the ending of the verb. I don't know if Spanish-speaking parents would attempt to sign declarative, explicit subject-free sentences with a sign for the pronoun before or after the verb. Since Spanish marks the subject at the end of the verb, it seems certainly plausible that an "illiterate" Spanish signer would try to imply the subject of the sentence after the verb, because that's how it appears in regular syntax. Any native Spanish speakers are welcome to contribute as to whether they think of the subject in these instances as before or after the verb. As one who learned Spanish as a second language, I applied the English framework to Spanish sentences when I learned them, and for me, while I may not know the person and number of the pronoun until after the end of the verb, I think I "picture" the sentence in my head in a (subject) doing (verb) construction.

So, if the homesign systems used by these three individuals is and was indeed marked by (sign for verb) then (sign for subject), and these participants in the study correctly intuited from the experiment some sort of distinction about subjects being at the beginning of phrases, I probably would conclude, as did the authors of this paper, that these three cases do indeed support a Chomskian view of an innate, universal syntax. However, there are definitely some problems with this experiment. In addition to the ones already noted, these people were adults and thus have been exposed to language throughout their lives. While they may not have been able to hear it, they've had homesign systems which are certainly more than nothing; they've interacted with other people in their community who probably structure their gestures in a different way; they've probably seen picture books and have encountered sentences and words in print to some degree of comprehension.

In sum, I've yet to encounter strong evidence in direct contradiction to Chomsky (though possibly the Piraha language does refute certain tenets of the theory, but I'd need to learn more about both before I could make conclusions), and the scientific articles I've yet encountered with regards to sign language and especially ISN all draw conclusions that support Chomsky. This could be simply because Chomsky is arguably the prevailing psycholinguist of the time and it's scientifically unfashionable and risky to contradict him, or it could be because he makes some strong, supportable claims. If there are some scientific articles that any reader is aware of that refute Chomsky and disagree with him outright, I would love to read them and would appreciate if you would post them in the comment section.