More Nicaraguan Sign Language Shtuff

The central article from Science by Ann Senghas and others. It's called

Children Creating Core Properties of Language: Evidence from an Emerging Sign Language in Nicaragua

After hunting around fruitlessly on ebscohost, I finally found the central paper which all the commentaries I read were commentating on. This is the original paper from 2004 that has spurred a lot of controversy, with some using it to support the "language instinct" theory and others refuting that claim. I will probably refer to it in depth in my paper, which will be the next blog. For now, let's set the scene:

So first the bare facts that (at least I consider to be) are minimally controversial. These come from The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua which was written by Laura Polich who focused more on the society and the progression of the deaf community.

1. In 1979 a researcher named Thomas Gibson found no deaf community in the country, but by 1986, Laura Polich and Ann Senghas found an established deaf community.
   
2. In 1981 the Vocational Center for the Disabled (COD) and it adopted a heterogeneous system of communication which was an early collaboration of former, basic systems.
   
3. By 1986 it had become a full language in use at the COD, and this was when Judy Kegl, came onto the scene and started her study of NSL (Nicaraguan Sign Language) or ISN (Idioma de Senas de Nicaragua).

In the chapter on the emergence of language, Polich searches for the reason behind the language eruption in 1986. She considers the hypothesis that "simply bringing young deaf, previously isolated children together will produce and eruption of a language." But disproves it by pointing out that this had happened many times before in Nicaragua. She also points out that there must be sufficient numbers for a sign language to develop, a "critical mass" as she puts it, though does not define it. She does say it must be more than twenty, though. She also makes another surprising claim. I was under the impression that deaf education was made possible after the Sandinista revolution (in 1979), but she claims that "The pre-revolutionary schools in Managua were much more eclectic and open to sign language than the post-revolutionary schools for deaf children, which were severely, adamantly, and dogmatically oral." An oral environment clearly won't be conducive to sign language, so why the flourishing of ISN after the revolution? The chapter dwindles off after that and never really returns to this question, though it might have been implicated that the stronger formation of a deaf community at that point was the impetus for language.


Signs of Evolution - A Scientific News Source on ISN

A couple quotes that attempt to sum up Senghas's article:

"The researchers found that older users of the new language used a relatively simple form, without formal grammar — whereas younger students used discrete words to form sentences in a way that resembled other languages. “Their first pantomine-like gestures evolved into a grammar of increasing complexity as new children learned the signs and elaborated. Now it has a formal name: Nicaraguan Sign Language, and is so distinct that it would not be understood by American and British signers.”"

Steven Pinker's take: "It shows that children have sophisticated mechanisms of language analysis which give language many of its distinctive qualities."

I thought this Pinker quote to be very interesting, in that he doesn't use the opportunity to point to innate language, but rather something similar to what Lera articulated earlier this quarter, that of "innate learning modules" or something to that effect, which are powerful, innate tools of analysis that children use to analyze the world around them and which are particularly adept at statistical analysis of language that teaches children how to follow linguistic rules, which sort of refutes the poverty of the stimulus hypothesis.