Friday, November 3, 2006

Speaking in signs

How did I miss this? The collaborative blog D___ Interesting has a darn interesting post today about the spontaneous birth of a language. The brief essay isn't particularly well done, but it introduced me to a fascinating bit of news. Maybe everyone else knows this.

It seems that a group of deaf, illiterate students at the same school in Nicaragua developed their own intricate sign language, complete with a system of syntax that included, get this, subject-verb agreement. Again, they were illiterate. These children, lacking all but the most basic language skills to begin with, had a lot of trouble learning existing worldwide sign languages.

Prior to these attempts at teaching them to communicate, deaf children in Nicaragua had interacted with their respective families via idiosyncratic systems of very rudimentary gestures (known as mimicas in Spanish). This meant that deaf children from different families couldn't even understand each other, let alone form friendships.

But an interesting effect appeared once the many deaf children had begun interacting in the group setting of the schools. The children started learning and elaborating on one another's mimicas, and the resulting system of signs rapidly grew. The amazed teachers watched as their students began to communicate quite successfully among themselves.

I find it particularly remarkable that the language was not in fact collectively created whole cloth. It involved meshing together existing signs that kids brought from home. A language wiki. This had to mean resolving conflicts, e.g. how to choose between competing signals meaning "I'm hungry."

This was one of those magic moments when a group of people essentially created the conditions for an enormously important experiment without anyone organizing the game. And what a success the experiment was.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:33 PM

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