Weekend Wordery: Nicaraguan Sign Language
Yuri Mejia, a student at the Escuelita de Bluefields school, signing “friend” in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Credit: Christina Gomez-Mira; courtesy of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc.
Until the early 1980s, deaf children in Nicaragua were mostly kept at home and did not attend school. They did not learn any kind of systematic sign language. But after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, determined efforts were made to improve the country’s education system, which had until then been one of the poorest in Latin America.
Deaf children were put into schools and taught Spanish, lipreading, and fingerspelling signs—with dismal results. However, outside the classroom, the children began to improvise signs to communicate with each other. At first their signs were like pantomime, and each child signed differently from every other child. But when a second wave of very young children enrolled in the deaf schools, something remarkable happened. The younger children signed more fluidly, more expressively, and with more complex and systematic combinations. They had spontaneously standardized their grammar. By the mid-80s, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) was well established.
NSL has afforded psycholinguists the unique opportunity to study a language in its infancy. New research led by Jennie Pyers elaborates the deep implications that language acquisition has for the development of other kinds of cognitive function. The study involved two cohorts of NSL signers: a group of pioneers whose early form of NSL lacked specific conventions for indicating spatial position (e.g., right, left, over, under); and a younger group who had learned the more developed NSL that did include basic spatial vocabulary. Ed Yong describes:
Pyers compared the abilities of people from both groups, now fully grown adults, in two spatial tests. First, she led them into a small room with a single red wall. She hid a token in one corner of the room, blindfolded the [subjects] and spun them around until they lost their bearings. When she removed the blindfold, the [subjects] had to say where the token was. The second test, like the first, involved hiding a token in the corner of a room, but this time the room was a tabletop model that was rotated while the [subjects] were blindfolded.
In both tests, the second group of adults (who learned the more advanced form of NSL) outperformed the first group. Even though their memories and ability to understand the tasks were just as good, the expanded vocabulary of geographical gestures that they learned as children also gave them better spatial abilities well into adulthood.
[...] Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.”
This is a step beyond evidence that language shapes our experience. It is evidence that the development of certain types of cognitive function is contingent upon language acquisition.
References:
- Pyers’ paper at PNAS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914044107 (Note that this link will not reach its target until the post-embargo publication window opens. It might take a few weeks for that to happen.)
- Photo via NSF.
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