James Shepard-Kegl – James and his wife Judy have been involved in Nicaraguan Sign Language for many years now. Carol Zall: That means that children have an outsized influence on language. ), Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, 19 (pp. Babies are not given grammar lessons and yet they reliably learn grammar because they have inherent expectations about how languages function, says Shepard-Kegl. It’s an opportunity that owes much to the birth of NSL occuring in the 1980s, when researchers had access to video cameras and could accurately record exactly what was happening. They copied the grammar the little kids generated.”. Sign languages are not simply a series of gestures; they utilise the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. Older deaf students would teach new students the Nicaraguan Sign Language, and that new generation of students, in turn, would expand on the language. Judy knew that this is something that can happen when a new language comes into being. Though older and younger students attended separate classes during school hours, on buses and playgrounds the children quickly began to select “conventions” for necessary words. And this is where the new language emerged. And it has helped fill in some gaps in our knowledge about how languages evolve, how they work, and the role a community plays in all of that — especially when it comes to the youngest learners. At all. And because there was a new group of kids entering the elementary school in Managua each year, researchers have been able to compare successive generations of signers, to see how the language has been changing over time. Her first stop was a vocational school. It want influenced by any existing language — spoken or signed — and instead is a completely novel language, brought about by children whose previous linguistic repertoire was limited to unsystematic gestures. Nicaraguan Sign Language: the Language of the Truly Stimulus-Impoverished For much of the history of the Nicaraguan state, deaf children had essentially no formal support from the government. The new Sandinista government had big plans for their country. Not only did this allow for the independent creation of Nicaraguan Sign Language, but it helped the nascent form of communication to survive. Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) first emerged in the 1970s when deaf children were brought together in schools in western Nicaragua. Arbitrating when to say ref, ump, or judge. It has been learned by successive waves of children from the same culture, all of whom began to learn at about the same age. Shepard-Kegl thought it would just be one trip. Â. Newscaster: “Victorious Sandinista rebels marched into Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua today.”. Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Span­ish: Idio­ma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign lan­guage that was largely spon­ta­neously de­vel­oped by deaf chil­dren in a num­ber of schools in west­ern Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. Which is not what you might expect. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front gained power, they embarked on what has been described as a “literacy crusade,” developing programs to promote fluency in reading Spanish. And the first place she went was a vocational school. English immersion for the deaf was part of a wider effort, epitomized by the eugenics movement, to stamp out differences within the American population. It's All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks? “You start building a vocabulary this way,” he says. I’m from Nicaragua. “A lot of those older kids weren’t generating grammar the way little kids did. Of all the changes within Nicaragua to come out of the overthrow of the Somoza regime by the Sandinistas in 1979, perhaps the least anticipated was the birth of a new language. “Kids are good at learning certain things, and since kids are the primary language learners, they are the ones who are selecting for what stays in language, essentially. Social distancing might not entirely change the way we talk, but a Mars expedition might do the trick. Rather, Nicaraguan Sign Language is as sophisticated, rule governed and versatile as any human language. Carol Zall has our report. Spanish is regarded as the official language of Nicaragua. Professor of Psychology and Director of the Language Acquisition and Development Research Laboratory Ann Senghas studies the evolution of language. The development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) within the last several years is a prime example of how a need leads to innovation. Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). She’s deaf. They had spent lots of time with the older children, and been exposed to the gestures and signs that the older group was using. One such initiative was opening the first public school for deaf education, the Melania Morales Special Education Center, in Managua’s Barrio San Judas. This occurred at a number of schools in western Nicaragua. Such conventions occur when a community of speakers, who at home may have all used different signs to refer to an object or action, begin to consistently default to using just one, says James Shepard-Kegl. She didn’t communicate much at all for the first few years of her life — until she went to a school for the deaf. Molly Flaherty is a psychology professor at Davidson College. Kids “don’t know what the [grammatical] rule is but [they] expect that there is a rule.” In Managua’s first deaf school, there was no model and no one to guide the children in sign language and still a language was created in a way never observed before. Please click below to consent to the use of this technology while browsing our site. Around the world, deaf sign languages, including the one spoken among African Americans in Raleigh, have disappeared or changed significantly when a more widely used language has entered the region. Judy teaches linguistics at the University of Southern Maine. Instead, they focused on teaching children to speak and lip-read Spanish. She’s looked at how the size of the language has been changing from one generation to the next. When children learn a language, they don’t just passively absorb words. Marco Werman: So, how exactly does Nicaraguan Sign Language tell us more about the human history of language and communication? The World is a public radio program that crosses borders and time zones to bring home the stories that matter. Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign language largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. She uses motion-tracking technology to follow the position of people’s wrists in space, to measures the physical size of the signs. Then at some point in human development, we began speaking to each other – eventually in ways that followed grammatical patterns. Molly says that older signers are aware that the language is changing — not just the size of the signs, but also things like vocabulary — and, at least some of them think that the younger signers are getting it all wrong: Molly Flaherty: Within the Nicaraguan sign community, you still, you know, will interact with people who will talk about how the kids are being so messy, and so sloppy, in their signing. This is not to say, however, that other independent community-based sign languages never existed. 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