The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language

Kocab, Annemarie; Senghas, Ann; Snedeker, Jesse

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.005

Cited by 26 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(92 reference statements)

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“…Homesign systems are largely based on improvisation (Goldin-Meadow, 2005). 1 In places where multiple homesigners come together with no existing sign language in place, such as in the first cohort of Nicaraguan Sign Language, interactive principles come to play a dominant role (Kocab, Senghas, & Snedeker, 2016). Finally, the influence of iterated learning can be seen in subsequent cohorts of NSL (Senghas & Coppola, 2001; M. E. Flaherty, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

Schouwstra¹,

Smith²,

Kirby³

2020

Preprint

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When people improvise to convey information by using only gesture and no speech (‘silent gesture’), they show language-independent word order preferences: SOV for extensional events (e.g., boy-ball-throw), but SVO for intensional events (e.g., boy-search-ball). Real languages tend not to condition word order on this kind of semantic distinction but instead use the same order irrespective of event type. Word order therefore exemplifies a contrast between naturalness in improvisation and conventionalised regularity in linguistic systems. We present an experimental paradigm in which initially-improvised silent gesture is both used for communication and culturally transmitted through artificial generations of lab participants. In experiments 1 and 2 we investigate the respective contributions of communicative interaction and cultural transmission on natural word order behaviour. We show that both interaction and iterated learning lead to a simplification of the word order regime, and the way in which this unfolds over time is surprisingly similar under the two mechanisms. The resulting dominant word order is mostly SVO, the order of the native language of our participants. In experiment 3, we manipulate the frequency of different semantic event types, and show that this can allow SOV order, rather than SVO order, to conventionalise. Taken together, our experiments demonstrate that where pressures for naturalness and regularity are in conflict, naturalness will give way to regularity as word order becomes conventionalised through repeated usage.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

Schouwstra¹,

Smith²,

Kirby³

2020

Preprint

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“…They have claimed rapid language development and change between cohorts of children in a deaf school in Nicaragua. In their work, the researchers focused on the development of temporal and spatial devices in this rapidly developing language (Senghas and Coppola, 2001; Kocab et al, 2016). Assignment to a cohort reflects both the age at which the signers arrived at the newly established school, and whether or not they had signing models in the environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing Complexity in a Young Sign Language

2018

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A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler, 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages – additive, symmetric, and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992). Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex).1 We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language.

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“…The present study chronicles the evolution of event construal in symmetrical and reciprocal expressions in homesign and in NSL as it emerges during its first 50 y. Previous work has established that, in many aspects, including its vocabulary and structure, this young language shares core properties with mature spoken and signed languages (14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19), though-as with any *Symmetrical words often appear in subject-complement constructions, such as North Korea is similar to Red China, as Amos Tversky (5) famously demonstrated. Its complementary sentence with noun phrases reversed (Red China is similar to North Korea) is not treated by research participants as equivalent in similarity value.…”

Section: Symmetry and Reciprocitymentioning

confidence: 70%

The emergence of the formal category “symmetry” in a new sign language

Gleitman

Senghas

Flaherty

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Logical properties such as negation, implication, and symmetry, despite the fact that they are foundational and threaded through the vocabulary and syntax of known natural languages, pose a special problem for language learning. Their meanings are much harder to identify and isolate in the child's everyday interaction with referents in the world than concrete things (like spoons and horses) and happenings and acts (like running and jumping) that are much more easily identified, and thus more easily linked to their linguistic labels (spoon, horse, run, jump). Here we concentrate attention on the category of symmetry [a relation R is symmetrical if and only if (iff) for all x, y: if R(x,y), then R(y,x)], expressed in English by such terms as similar, marry, cousin, and near. After a brief introduction to how symmetry is expressed in English and other well-studied languages, we discuss the appearance and maturation of this category in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). NSL is an emerging language used as the primary, daily means of communication among a population of deaf individuals who could not acquire the surrounding spoken language because they could not hear it, and who were not exposed to a preexisting sign language because there was none available in their community. Remarkably, these individuals treat symmetry, in both semantic and syntactic regards, much as do learners exposed to a previously established language. These findings point to deep human biases in the structures underpinning and constituting human language. language emergence | sign language | logical structure of language | homesign | symmetry T o a first approximation, language describes the entities-the lions, spoons, puppies-and events-the running, chasing, eating-that figure in everyday life. However, an immediate counter, or at least refinement, of this view of language is that events, as well as entities, can be construed in more than one way, a distinction that is reflected in the lexical forms and structures of all known languages. For example, the same event could equally be described as "a lion chasing a gnu" or "a gnu fleeing a lion." What is seen in the ambient world is the same, but, in one case, it is viewed from the perspective of the causal agent (the lion) and, in the other, from the perspective of the potential victim (the gnu). Assembling a sentence is not just a matter of mentioning the gnu and the lion and the running, but necessarily entails a perspective on the events under description, their construal. Indeed, it is not the events per se that sentences encode; it is their construals.This presents a puzzle: the construal of an event is abstract and not observable per se. How would a learner of a language come to appreciate the relevant encoding, and how would such distinctions arise in a new language?We examine the foundations of this core distinction between observation and construal by first gleaning insights about its encoding from a mature language, English. We then explore experimentally whether and when such a distinct...

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The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language

Cited by 26 publications

References 66 publications

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

Constructing Complexity in a Young Sign Language

The emergence of the formal category “symmetry” in a new sign language

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