Repeating context from Bruce Nevin 2018-12-03_14:36:33 UTC in a parallel thread: interviews with researchers in this podcast suggest that language has a more fundamental and essential role in cognition than I had realized, stitching together what are disparate ‘islands’ of perception in animals, small children, and (a startling story!) in adults who lack language.Â
I followed up the story in the podcast about the role of 8 to 10 year olds in creating a new language de novo.
The story: In 1977, a special education center for congenitally deaf children was established in Managua, Nicaragua. Prior to that, deaf children were with their separated families, and each developed idiosyncratic ‘home signs’ to communicate basic needs. From 50 in 1977, the school population had grown to 100 in 1979, the year of the Sandinista revolution. In 1980, the Democratic Socialist government opened a vocational school for deaf adolescents, and the population in the two school had increased to over 400. Like Alexander Graham Bell, they were sold on ‘oralism’ vs. ‘signing’ (two battling camps in the world of pedagogy for the deaf), but they had only very limited success teaching lip reading, and their students just didn’t get what Spanish was about.Â
However, they were not prohibited from signing among themselves, and over time their disparate ‘home sign’ ways converged into a common way of signing.Â
“By combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems, a pidgin-like form and a creole-like language rapidly emerged. They were creating their own language. This “first-stage” pidgin has been called Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense (LSN) and is still used by many who attended the school at this time.” (Wikipedia)
(You will presently see the significance in this story that those early attenders still use this primitive pidgin 40 years later, despite exposure to later developments.)
The staff couldn’t understand what the children were saying, but they didn’t ask for help until 1986, when they called on a sign language linguist from MIT, Judy Kegl.
By that time, there had been 9 ‘generations’ of incoming students since the 50 in 1977, 6Â ‘generations’ since the 400 in 1980. The annual arrival of newly-exposed children is crucial to this story, especially those under age 10.
(Coincidentally, Zellig Harris’s daughter Eva had already been working in Nicaragua for several years. She’s a microbiologist at U.C. Berkeley still working in Nicaragua, now focused especially on the virus that causes Dengue fever, and more broadly on sophisticated low-budget public health in developing countries. She’s married to a Nicaraguan. We’ll get to the significance of this coincidence presently.)
Other linguists after Dr. Kegl have got involved. References that I’ve listed at the end of this post describe how they have observed the refinement and sophistication of this pidgin sign language progressively with each new generation of children. In brief:
- Signing gestures at first were close to the miming done by congenitally deaf adults who lack language (another part of the podcast). These relatively large and expressive/depictive gestures became more compact, stylized, and conventionalized to signs with each generation.
- Children under about age 10 innovate as they learn the sign language of the community that they move into.
- The change that is the focus of the referenced studies is the emergence of spatial orientation as a modifier of signs. This is a well-known feature of ASL and other sign languages that have been created by people with prior knowledge of language. Signing before the chest has straightforward (so to speak) meaning, and the same sign to the right or to the left denotes a modification of the basic sign.
- Orientation is used to indicate co-reference of two signs to the same individual or to the same temporal context. Hereby hangs the central entry point of my particular interest in this.
- This side channel for information is overloaded, in that there is no overt way to distinguish e.g. same person from same time, or same person from same utensil that the person was using for eating.Â
- This is because this metalanguage device–the means for signing about signs themselves (this present sign has the same referent as that prior sign)–is not part of the signing system itself. The metalanguage is separate from the language. And it is because it lacks ‘words’ (signs), but rather is only a modifier of signs, its capacity as a metalanguage is impoverished.
- Worse, this side channel for information is also overloaded for anotehr reason. It is used for purely expressive purposes, e.g. turning rhythmically from side to side in the progress of a narrative.
In natural language, the metalanguage is part of the language. We can use words to refer to words and to assert co-reference and the like. For example, I could say any of the following, in progressively more explicit form:
I read the paper by Kocab et al.
I read the paper which is by Kocab et al.
I read a paper; it is by Kocab et al.
I read a paper; a paper (previous word same as a prior word)Â is by Kocab et al.
The last paraphrase is unnatural because previous same as prior is asserted explicitly in words, rather than the immediately previous occurrence of paper being reduced to the pronoun it (which carries the metalanguage information ‘same as something said nearby’), or being reduced to the -ich part of which (which carries the metalanguage information ‘same as as a closely preceding word’), plus (by a longer route) the definite article in the paper. Even the which can be reduced to zero because that paraphrase relation is conventional and the metalanguage assertion of same reference is understood.
It may be that these signers cannot recite “This is the house that Jack built” because there are too many distinct same-reference links in the chain. The song “I am my own grandpa” may be inaccessible to them unless they have writing as a bridge to the metalanguage capacities of spoken language.
Now the particular personal interest that this story sparked in me. In 1994, Terry Langendoen’s review of Zellig Harris’s Language and information: A mathematical approach was published in the journal of the Linguistic Society of America:
Langendoen, D. T. 1994. Review of A Theory of Language and Information: A Mathematical Approach by Zellig Harris. Language, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 585-588.
… the concluding paragraph of section 10.7, ‘Non-linguistic systems; music’, says something so outrageous that I am compelled to quote it in its entirety (318):
'Finally, it seems that the sign language of the deaf does not have an explicit operator-argument partial ordering, nor an internal metalanguage, but rests upon a direct juxtaposition of the relevant referents. This applies to autonomous sign languages, developed by the deaf without instruction from people who know spoken language.
Lest there be any doubt about the implications of this paragraph, by ‘internal metalanguage’ Harris means the sentences which constitute the grammar of the language (359).
Harris was clearly referring to the endogenous sign language in Nicaragua, which he had learned about from his daughter Eva Harris. The discussion so far has been about the absence of a metalanguage that is part of the language itself. The further part about an explicit operator-argument partial ordering suggests to me that in this sign language they couldn’t have a “he said-she said” conversation, or to remark that they once thought thus and so but because of such and such have concluded that so and so did it. The sign language would have to have acquired the capacity to have one verb assert something about another (“an explicit operator-argument partial ordering”), probably, but maybe not provably, from their instruction in Spanish language literacy.
References to follow up:
A general discussion, like the above linked Wikipedia article:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-languageÂ
Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar. Psychological Science, 12(4), 323–328. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00359
There’s a paywall there; it’s posted here:
http://ling.umd.edu/~omaki/teaching/Ling240_Summ2007/Senghas%26Coppola01_NicaraguanSL.pdf
That was 2001. More recent:
···
At the end, breaking abruptly from the general tenor and flow of his review, he  wrote:
Senghas, Ann. 2011. The Emergence of Two Functions for Spatial Devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language Hum Dev. 2011 Jan; 53(5): 287–302. doi:Â [10.1159/000321455]
Kocab, Annemarie, Pyers, Jennie, & Senghas, Ann. (2015). Referential shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: a transition from lexical to spatial devices. Front Psychol. 2014; 5: 1540. Published online Jan 9. doi:Â [10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01540]