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New Sign Language Suggests Children Create Language's Fundamentals Through Learning
Following is a transcript of a portion of NPR's All Thing Considered which featured Barnard professor Ann Senghas. It aired on September 16, 2004. Click here to go back to the main story on Senghas' research.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT
Date September 16, 2004
Time 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Program All Things Considered
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
A rare linguistic event has occurred in Latin America. A
new language has been born. It's not spoken. It's signed.
It was invented by deaf children in Nicaragua.
And as NPR's Joe Palka reports, it's helping to resolve a
long-standing debate about the origins of language.
JOE PALKA reporting:
Until the late 1970s, there were no special schools for
deaf children in Nicaragua. Deaf children communicated as
best they could with their hearing classmates and teachers.
But then, a school for the deaf opened in Managua.
Ann Senghas is a psychologist at Barnard College of
Columbia University.
Ms. ANN SENGHAS (Barnard College of Columbia University):
Evidently, the children who came together at that time were
enough of a critical mass that when they started
communicating and gesturing with each other, something
different started to happen. They started to build on the
gestures that they were doing and, in continuing to
interact, turned that into a language.
PALKA: Senghas says people can communicate with each other
by gestures, but that's not the same as language. Language
has certain hallmarks.
Ms. SENGHAS: One of these hallmarks is that languages are
made up of discreet little pieces, that they have little
building blocks that get built up into larger and larger
forms.
PALKA: So for example, Senghas says there are only about
40 discreet sounds used in English, but those sounds can be
combined into a wealth of words. And using a set of
specific rules, those words can be combined into a wealth
of concepts.
Senghas has spent the last 15 years studying how the deaf
children in Nicaragua created their own building blocks.
Ms. SENGHAS: They already had something that looked really
useful. They had these--these gestures that could be
pretty communicative. But evidently, they weren't
language-like enough for them, and they broke them down
into something that was more language-like, into these very
small analyzed pieces that they could then use to build up
more and more complex expressions.
PALKA: To understand how they did this, think about how
you would use gestures to express the phrase, 'the ball is
rolling down the hill.'
Ms. SENGHAS: If you gesture 'rolling down'--if you think
about yourself talking about 'rolling down,' if your
gesture includes both rolling and down-ness, they happen at
the same time, just like they happen at the same time in
the event.
So you might do a circular movement with your hand as it's
moving down. You would never do a rolling movement first,
followed by a downward movement. We say 'roll' followed by
'down,' but we don't gesture 'roll' followed by gesture
'down.'
PALKA: And the children who invented their new language
made up individual signs for 'roll' and 'down,' and then
combined them, using their own set of rules.
Ms. SENGHAS: So they would do a 'roll' sign--just a
'roll'--and then a 'down,' and then they'd produce 'roll'
again. And that would tell them that this was a single
event in which both rolling and descent both happened.
PALKA: Senghas's study of the Nicaraguan children appears
in the current issue of the journal "Science."
Now, linguists will tell you that one amazing feature of
all the world's languages is that they all have these
simple, discreet elements that are combined to make more
complex concepts. Psychologist Susan Golden-Meadow at the
University of Chicago says the question is, how did that
happen?
Ms. SUSAN GOLDEN-MEADOW (University of Chicago): One model
of language is that it got invented once, and then it kept
getting passed down from generation to generation. And it
changed as it moved about.
It kept a lot of its fundamental properties the same, but
it had to be passed down from generation to generation. It
was sort of a one-time insight.
PALKA: But Golden-Meadow says another model is that we
possess some innate ability to make language in a
particular way. The new study seems to support that view.
After all, Golden-Meadow says the Nicaraguan children
didn't have a language passed down to them.
Ms. GOLDEN-MEADOW: And this suggests that the properties
of language are to some extent determined by people, and
can be created de novo by individuals and groups.
PALKA: In other words, if we don't have a language
available to us, we'll make one up, using rules that we all
seem to be born with. Joe Palka, NPR NEWS, Washington.
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