Steven Crane

December 12, 2007

Language and Society introsem with Lera Boroditsky

Final Paper

Nicaraguan Sign Language: The Birth and Transmission of a New Language

Where Does Language Come From?

It is a remarkable ability of children to master language. Adults are usually those who master complex bodies of knowledge, that is, it takes years of experience and detailed, explicit instruction in classrooms to acquire similarly complex abilities such as programming a computer, reading and writing, or finding and incorporating academic sources in a scholarly paper. Explaining the ease with which children learn language, Noam Chomsky of MIT and many of his followers including Steven Pinker now of Harvard argue that there is something special and specific to language in the human brain that causes certain patterns and characteristics to arise in the learning and expression of individual languages, and among many languages. What that something is varies from source to source and is not yet something tangible like a specific chunk of brain or sequence of genes, but their theories are often well-articulated and accepted. Though Chomsky and Pinker are both powerful intellectuals in the arena of psycholinguistics, their claims are not without controversy or viable alternative.

Instead, it could very well be that children master language because they are typically exposed to it continually every day of their lives. To counter this, one might argue that children are also driven around in cars quite often, or see their caretakers cooking meals on a daily basis, yet they don’t spontaneously develop the ability to drive or cook without instruction; however, children lack the strength and motor control to accomplish either of these tasks until later in life. Perhaps if children were born with bodies powerful enough to drive cars, the symbolic understanding that certain colors of lights and squiggles on metal signs are meant to determine the behavior of the driver, and an understanding of Newtonian physics, then they would be able to drive without instruction at the age of five, but they don’t. Instead, most children are born with all the tools and abilities to receive language. The lack of innately skilled teenage drivers could also be explained by postulating, as Professor Boroditsky has done in discussion, that what is innate are certain learning modules that are applicable to certain things, but not others. Further, these learning modules are not specific to language; language just happens to be something that humans are particularly adept at learning, analyzing, and finding patterns in.

Do children have an innate knowledge of language structure and an instinct to express this inborn ability in a certain critical period of their early life? Or do they simply have a certain absorbency resulting from a stronger ability to draw information from their environments when they are younger? In other words, are children more like pre-programmed computers that only need a few switches thrown for language to develop, or are they more like selectively-permeable sponges that absorb linguistic stimuli especially adeptly? While children are neither computers or sponges, the purpose of this paper will be to distill from one specific example, Nicaraguan Sign Language, what linguistic evidence is and is not present and what conclusions are or aren’t valid as drawn from that evidence. As it turns out, the phenomena of Nicaraguan Sign Language creation is often misconstrued by many who neglect certain historical events. The language wasn’t as much a spontaneous creation from nothing, but more a gradual creation with a variety of inputs and influences, making the situation and subsequent experiments less ideal than some of the researchers working there present. Despite the complications surrounding the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and the situation of the birth of the language aside, there is strong evidence for the poverty of the stimulus argument. In other words, new signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language do express certain constructions to which they’ve not previously had experience. Therefore, the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, though it may not be a scientifically ideal situation, supports the theory that children create and solidify certain grammatical constructs to which they have never been exposed.

The History of the Deaf in Nicaragua

According to Steven Pinker’s understanding of the birth of ISN, “until recently there were no sign languages at all in Nicaragua because its deaf people remained isolated from one another” (36) and that it took the Sandinista Revolution to found a centralized school for the deaf. This school, Pinker admits, was dogmatic and tried to force deaf children to learn lip-reading and speech, and failed in these pursuits. However, Pinker maintains that it was on the playgrounds, between classes, and on the bus rides to and from school that formerly isolated and non-linguistic children spontaneously developed a pidgin sign language called LSN (el Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense). This language was a pidgin language in that it relied on many circumlocutions and indirect forms of expression without certain convenient grammatical devices. As new, younger deaf students came to the school, however, they picked up LSN, and actually changed the language in an amazingly enriching way. They took LSN, streamlined its circumlocutions, created grammatical devices, and made it a highly rich, expressive sign language known by a different name, ISN (el Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense or NSL, Nicaraguan Sign Language). To Pinker, it was “a language ... born before our eyes” (37) out of virtually nothing.

Pinker’s conclusions are based on the work of Judy Kegl and Ann Senghas. In the article “Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar” by Ann Senghas and Marie Coppola of Barnard College of Columbia University and the University of Rochester, respectively, Senghas and Coppola conclude from their experimental evidence that “sequential cohorts of interacting young children collectively possess the capacity not only to learn, but also to create, language” (1). In other words, they argue that their results prove that young children have the ability to introduce and unify systems of grammar. Gary Morgan of the City University London and Judy Kegl of the University of Southern Maine also have an article, “Nicaraguan Sign Language and Theory of Mind: the issue of critical periods and abilities.” Of more pertinence to this paper than their conclusions on language and theory of mind is their description of the situation in Nicaragua surrounding the birth of ISN. Kegl first visited Nicaragua in 1986 and spent years studying ISN, especially with relation to the new learners of ISN. Her portrait of the birth of ISN is that which Pinker shares: a situation with an absence of language turning into a full language.

However, the historical accuracy of their account of Nicaraguan deaf education was put under question in 2005 when Laura Polich wrote her book The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua. Polich of Lamar University spent a number of years doing field observations of deaf students in twenty different schools, conducted polls of deaf students and teachers of deaf students, and surveyed 225 deaf individuals regarding their backgrounds. Instead of the nearly ideal linguistic environment suggested by Pinker, Kegl, and Senghas, Polich proposes, “the sign language in Nicaragua did not develop in a vacuum, but owes a debt to multiple influences” (168). These influences were the various home-sign systems (simple systems of rudimentary gestures used around a home with a deaf child for day-to-day purposes) that students brought with them to schools, occasional Spanish and American signs picked up from dictionaries, Thomas Gibson, an American Peace Corps volunteer who taught ASL, and Adrian Perez, a deaf student who spent eight years in Spain using sign language. Further, while the Sandinista revolution did bring marginally more deaf pupils to schools for the deaf, Polich concludes from hundreds of interviews, “the pre-revolutionary schools… were much more eclectic and open to sign language than the post-revolutionary schools for deaf children, which were severely, adamantly, and dogmatically oral” (157). Polich argues that it was a matter of the huge community of deaf individuals that arose in the 1980s that gave birth to ISN, for there had been many instances of deaf individuals interacting and even attending the same school before then, but it was only after the number of deaf individuals in the community hit what she calls a “critical mass” (155) that ISN was born and generated.

The thoroughness with which Polich conducted her research lends credibility to what she presents as facts. ISN was not created in a vacuum, and it was perhaps out of the necessity of building a community that new learners took to the language with such gusto. The poverty of the stimulus argument (at least relative to language innateness) contends that there are certain characteristics that emerge in children’s speech which are not present in the speech of those from whom they learn. That is, the response provoked (new utterances) could not have been the result of external stimuli alone, something must be innate. The complications to the picture of how ISN was generated must be taken into account when considering scientific conclusions that depend on the poverty of the stimulus argument.

Experimental Evidence

Take two-hundred infants straight from their mothers’ wombs, raise them on a previously uninhabited island by caretakers who used no language, and then bring in some psycholinguists to track the development of their utterances from incoherent babble language, and from creation down through the generations. Scientifically rigorous as this experiment would be, the experiment facetiously proposed by Dr. Lera Boroditsky in class discussion clearly would be cost-prohibitive and morally questionable, plus it’s not clear that any language would ever develop, especially not in the first generation. That leaves psycholinguistic researchers with the dilemma of finding a situation that has certain traits similar to the “infant island” experiment that would make it ideal for the study of how languages are born, learned, and passed down to new learners. They look for the emergence of a new language, and a common place to do that is when a pidgin language, a fairly basic second-language used between two groups who do not speak the other’s language, becomes a creole language, a more advanced language that seems to arise out of nowhere with certain linguistic traits not inherited from any parent language.

While not as ideal an experiment as Infant Island, consider the experiment outlined in the article “Children Creating Language” Senghas and Coppola of Barnard College of Columbia University and the University of Rochester, respectively. This article, published in 2000 in the Journal of Psychological Science studied the emergence of spatial modulation. Spatial modulation is a grammatical structure common to all studied sign languages (Senghas referencing Supalla, 1995) in which the signer takes regular signs and instead of producing them neutrally in front of the chest, gives them certain grammatical distinctions such as person, number or location in time by modulating where the sign appears: left, right, up, or down relative to the chest. They focused on a particular type of spacial modulation: shared reference. Shared reference refers to the situation in which a signer places a sign in a specific spatial location and then further signs in that specific spatial location also refer to the previous sign which was placed there. For example, when outlining the characters in a narrative, a signer might sign a person into existence in the left of the signer’s field of vision. Later, transitive verb signs such as “hit,” “love,” and “thank” might all be produced to the left, in the same direction as the man in the narrative, indicating that he was the one hit, loved, and thanked.

In summary of the experiment, they took their twenty-four Nicaraguan experimental participants who had each had at least four and a half years of exposure to ISN. The test participants were split into two cohorts, one of the older generation of signers who learned ISN at an earlier stage, and one of the younger generation of signers who had learned ISN at a later stage in the language’s development. They had the participants view a two-minute animated cartoon, and then videotaped the participants signing the narrative of the story to a deaf peer. Using the data from the videotapes, they then analyzed them in a variety of ways, looking for overall levels of fluency, use of spatial modulation, and examples of shared reference.

The results of their experiment suggest that spatial modulations were used more often and more adeptly by signers who had been exposed to ISN at an earlier age than those who hadn’t, and further, when they did use spatial modulations, it was most likely to be in the context of shared reference and not just as a general increase in spatial modulation. Also, they found that the signers exposed earlier in life were also more fluent as judged by morphemes per minute than their counterparts who were exposed to ISN later in life, despite being younger and having had less overall practice and exposure than most of those in the older cohort.

Concluding, Senghas and Coppola postulate that this evidence supports the idea that each subsequent generation of signers of ISN are creating and shaping their language as they go along learning it. They argue that it is more than just a random mutation of language, or an accidental error. Instead, it is a positive influence on the language in a profound way, “enabl[ing] long-distance grammatical relationships among words” (5). Further, the greater prevalence of spatial modulations and shared reference in younger signers was not simply a matter of the children having grabbed on to one aspect of language and overusing it, because those same children were also the ones who had greater overall fluency. Also, more than just the regularization of a formerly inconsistently-applied rule, the changes the children made were permanent. That is, the situation was not analogous to an English-speaking child who says, “I holded the cat” because he heard the words “scolded,” and “folded” and regularized the irregular verb-form “held;” instead, the new signers took one small, rarely-used artifact from the language of their teachers and made it a far more universal rule. They allowed their language greater flexibility and efficiency, and made it similar to older, better-established sign languages such as ASL which also uses shared reference. Finally, the new cohort of ISN signers did indeed create a new interpretation to the language that was previously absent, Senghas and Coppola claim. They say, “only members of the second cohort interpret the modulations as limiting potential referents” (5). In other words, it’s only the new generation of signers who take spatial modulations to be indicative of any sort of specific, limited meaning. The old cohort may use spatial reference from time to time, but for them, the spatial reference might mean something, but it is not something specific, and it is not a hard and fast rule as it is for the new cohort.

Senghas and Coppola say they chose to study spatial modulation specifically because it was not present in the signers’ linguistic environment, that is, it was not present in spoken Spanish or in signs borrowed directly from common Nicaraguan gestures. A point of contention, however, is regarding their assertion that spatial modulation is not present in the linguistic environment. If my personal experiences with Spanish in Mexico and Costa Rica and with the English language are any indication, people speaking language often use their hands, even, sometimes, in spatially-referent ways. For example, I might point my hands at myself when emphasizing that I had done something, gesture to a “you” to whom I was speaking when emphasizing something that person had done, and (most importantly), I might extend an open hand in a third direction when introducing a third, absent person as a metaphorical representation of that person in relation to myself. Therefore, it is hard to accept the assertion that there were no-spatially referent stimuli available to the first generation of ISN creators and users.

However, what is clear from their experiment is that the second cohort of ISN signers did indeed employ advanced linguistic structures far more often than the first cohort. The new generation had and employed the ability to systematize their language, and affect it in a major way using newly-created grammatical structures and rules in their language. More than just introducing new slang or modifying individual words as are the contributions that most generations make to well-established languages, Nicaraguan children created a new grammatical construction, as if it were innate. What’s more, this construction, supposedly unbeknownst to the signers of cohort two, is a common characteristic that’s indeed universal to all known sign languages.

Toward Theories of Language Acquisition

Very rarely are psycholinguists granted the opportunity to study a language from its inception, but in Nicaragua over the course of a few decades there seemed to emerge a language where none existed before. There is virtual consensus that Nicaragua in the twentieth century is one of the richest sources on the emergence of a language available to researchers; however, rich as it may be, it is still not the infant island experiment and is full of possible theoretical holes. Further, the history of the deaf in Nicaragua is not as clear-cut as a scientific experiment would require. Laura Polich spent an entire book detailing the gradual emergence of a deaf community in Nicaragua over the course of seven decades, far more than the two decades that Pinker, Kegl, and Senghas usually reference. Further, it’s not clear (and probably never could be clear) whether the signers of cohort two all spontaneously developed spatial modulations with shared reference, or whether one particularly insightful signer thought to employ that construction one day, and people ended up copying him. In a sample size that’s so small, it’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about the nature of the language in general, let alone all languages in general and all brains which produce language.

Senghas and Coppola show the emergence of a new linguistic trait among a cohort of signers of ISN. This process is fairly common among the fairly uncommon phenomena of the emergence of creole languages from pidgin languages. Does the emergence of novel grammatical devices support the notion that there are certain linguistic traits that will arise in all languages? If that’s true, what is the origin of these universal characteristics? Is it an innate result, arising from a “distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains” (Pinker 18) or a “genetic basis for language acquisition?” (Chomsky viii). Or perhaps is it just a symptom of living on the same earth, traveling through the same three-dimensional space, feeling the same forces of gravity and power that give disparate languages universal structures?

In the end, neither Nicaraguan Sign Language nor any creole could provide exhaustive evidence for any universal truth regarding the level of innateness of language, the characteristics and qualifications of that innateness, or theories of a universal grammar or language instinct. In fact, any claim that something is “universal” whether on the level of individual brains or among the world’s languages is virtually impossible to prove conclusively. Further, theories that children possess learning modules that are widely applicable to multiple things, including language are also supported by the creolization process: children might simply pick up on an occasionally-used or accidentally-used structure, find it useful, use it often, and thereby add it to the language. However, the search of a theory consistent with the findings of the psycholinguistic study of ISN has led me to conclude that the birth and characteristics of ISN are indeed two small data points on the grand balance of competing linguistic theories that fall on the plate of the likes of Pinker and Chomsky. Granted, there are a number of books and articles on this topic not available through the Stanford library and database system, thus there are probably theories and interpretations not even addressed in this paper. Also, the main scientific work examined in this paper was chosen because it examined and attempted to draw conclusions about the innateness of language, while others exist which may offer different conclusions based on similar evidence. However, despite the flaws in the situation of ISN and in the theories of language innateness, if one suspends suspicion temporarily, he or she could safely draw the conclusion that ISN did emerge rather spontaneously, and that successive generations of ISN learners generate and shape the language in profound ways, as if to “bring it up to scratch” with other world sign languages.

Works Cited

Supalla, T. (1995). An implicational hierarchy in verb agreement in American Sign Language. Unpublished manuscript, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.

Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children creating language: “How Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired a spatial grammar.” Psychological Science, 12, 323-328.

Polich, L. 2005. The Emergence of the deaf community in Nicaragua: "With sign language you can learn so much." Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct: “How the Mind Creates Language.” New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Language and Mind: Third Edition. Cambridge, NY. Cambridge University Press.