Validating Silent Gesture Lab Studies in a Naturally Emerging Sign Language: How Order is Used to Describe Intensional Versus Extensional Events in Nicaraguan Sign Language

Abstract

Languages are neither designed in classrooms nor drawn from dictionaries—they are products of human minds and human interactions. However, it is challenging to understand how structure grows in these circumstances because generations of use and transmission shape and reshape the structure of the languages themselves. Laboratory studies on language emergence investigate the origins of language structure by requiring participants, prevented from using their own natural language(s), to create a novel communication system and then transmit it to others. Because the participants in these lab studies are already speakers of a language, it is easy to question the relevance of lab‐based findings to the creation of natural language systems. Here, we take the findings from a lab‐based language emergence paradigm and test whether the same pattern is also found in a new natural language: Nicaraguan Sign Language. We find evidence that signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language may show the same biases seen in lab‐based language emergence studies: (1) they appear to condition word order based on the semantic dimension of intensionality and extensionality, and (2) they adjust this conditioning to satisfy language‐internal order constraints. Our study adds to the small, but growing literature testing the relevance of lab‐based studies to natural language birth, and provides convincing evidence that the biases seen in the lab play a role in shaping a brand new language.