Deaf Kids in Nicaragua Give Birth to New Language

[RandomUser]

Deaf children thrown together in a school in Nicaragua without any type of formal instruction invented their own sign language -- a sophisticated system that has evolved and grown, researchers reported on Friday.

Their observations show that children, not adults, are key to the evolution and development of language, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"It is the birth of a language," said Ann Senghas of Columbia University's Barnard College, who led the study.

The living laboratory of up to 1,000 children at a school in Managua was made possible because of the neglect of deaf people before the 1970s, a time of political and social turmoil in Nicaragua.
--snip--

http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=6267627

[GAspnes]

1. fascinating story

At a school in Nicaragua, deaf children are speaking a new language entirely their own, but it follows rules fundamental to all languages. Researchers report in Science that without coaching, the children used language rules to create a whole new language from the raw material of gestures in order to communicate. NPR's Joe Palca reports.

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3922325

[RandomUser]

2. It's such a complicated issue

On the one hand, this argues that there is some common component to language learning and formation in children, likely genetic rather than environomental. And yet, the study of dyslexia in different languages, such as orthogonal (chinese) vs. phonetic (english), seems to indicate that the roots of different languages utilize entirely different segments of the brain depending on what the underlying language type is.

I wonder if this means that all verbal languages use the same part of the brain, but that written languages each use a different part.

But even that isn't entirely explanatory, considering that tonal vs. phonetic langauge users have different hearing perception developments.

Fascinating indeed.

[GAspnes]

3. it gets better

not only is the predisposition to language genetic (and if you don't hear one, you'll make one up), but your *ears* are physically differentiated.

It has long been known that different parts of the brain process different kinds of sounds. The left hemisphere, for example, deciphers rapidly changing sounds such as speech, whereas the right hemisphere dominates the processing of tones and musical sounds. But, explains Yvonne Sininger of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles, no one has looked closely at the role played by the ear in processing auditory signals. Sininger and co-author Barbara Cone-Wesson of the University of Arizona spent six years evaluating the hearing of newborns before they left the hospital. More than 3,000 babies had their hearing tested using a tiny probe (see image) that measures how much certain sounds are amplified by parts of the ear.

The researchers tested the children's hearing using two types of sounds: sustained tones and a set of rapid clicks, which were timed to imitate speech. We were intrigued to discover that the clicks triggered more amplification in the baby's right ear, while the tones induced more amplification in the baby's left ear, Sininger remarks. This parallels how the brain processes speech and music, except the sides are reversed due to the brain's cross connections. According to the authors, the results indicate that auditory processing begins in the ear, before sounds reach the brain, and could help to improve therapies for hearing-impaired patients. Notes Cone-Wesson: Sound processing programs for hearing devices could be individualized for each ear to provide the best conditions for hearing speech or music. --Sarah Graham

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0000EC2C-11A4-1142-87D683414B7F4945