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.
The Limp Platitudes and Inconsistent Nonsense of Strunk & White
In my first semester of law school, I got into a brief classroom contretemps with an instructor over a matter of grammar. The instructor believed that a sentence of the form ‘there is a controversy about x’ is in the passive voice. Opining that good writing avoids passive constructions whenever possible, she stated her preference for the appalling formulation ‘a controversy exists about x.’ I interjected that ‘there is x’ is not a passive construction, and that there is nothing generally wrong with the passive voice anyway.
The instructor derisively awarded me a “gold star for the day,” trivializing my challenge to her usage dictatorship (while leaving it unclear to all whether she was admitting I was right). She then renewed a prior demand of absolute conformity.
I sat back, withdrew to somewhere inside Wernicke’s area, and silently counted the times she violated her own capricious rules. I may be a snoot, in David Foster Wallace’s sense (pdf), but I am not bullheaded.
This year, 2009, was the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Linguist and grammarian Geoffrey Pullum wishes it would rest in peace.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Zing! There is a common malady among Americans of the English-class-high-performer type—people who are otherwise attitudinally permissive, but who inexplicably submit themselves to the total embrace of certain stodgy precepts of grammar, syntax, and diction. This malady is viral. And though none can say whether we would suffer from it had this book never been written, it is clear that The Elements of Style sits at the vector origin of this particular memeplex.
More from Pullum:
The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.
* * *
What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.
Read Pullum’s whole piece and be absolved of needless anxiety over the passive voice, split infinitives, and interchangeable use of ‘which’ and ‘that’ to introduce relative clauses. It’s ok. There are no rules against those things. And there never have been. They were the product of the dogmatic and uninformed imaginations of William Strunk and E.B. White, “a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”
Via Austin Frakt.
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