Conference: 4 Instincts Lead the Way

The recent, natural creation of a sign language by deaf children in Nicaragua depended on four instincts, Judy Kegl, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern Maine, told an audience at the Stellenbosch “Cradle of Language Conference” today (Nov. 7, 2006). (Abstract here.)

In a presentation titled “The Whole Shebang: Looking at Language as a Human Trait,” Kegl outlined the four instincts she believes led to the creation of a new language by deaf children brought together in a special school in Nicaragua: rhythm, imitation, innate hunger for language, and peer pressure.

Kegl says that deaf children who remain isolated in a home will not develop language. Language is an all-or-nothing process. She said her view contrasts with that of Marie Coppola at the University of Chicago. Coppola argues that a communication system can be a partially developed language. Kegl, therefore, referred to the Nicaraguan children as “language isolates,” meaning they were children who had not developed language, although each had separately developed a few gestures to signal basic needs like hunger, or the desire to go to the bathroom. Kegl’s position is that these gestures had not yet become the “soup” of language. These language isolates were older than hearing children who have learned the language of their environment, but they were still under seven years of age. Only when they came together did they create a new language and a new language community.

They were able to achieve this wonder through the instinctive guidance of four qualities:

1. Love of rhythm or prosody. Children are drawn to rhythmic interactions and a group of deaf children, even though they do not hear music, will be attracted to the repetitive back-and-forth of gesture. They repeat and vary the gestures they had developed in an attempt to make others understand them. Single gestures become repeated, and even become strings of gestures.
2. A taste for mirroring. Seeing another child’s gestures, young children naturally copy the ones they can make themselves. This process increases the pool of gestures available to each child and gives them a pool of common gestures.
3. An innate or internal language appetite and competence. Although the gesture pool that is available to the children has not become soup yet, the children do not know that. They are ready and eager to use language, and the gesture pool is the closest they have come to encountering language, so they seize upon it and each child individually develops a language of his or her own.
4. The wish to be like one's peers. The children begin to see that their language is not the same as the others. Instead of each clinging to their own individuality, they move toward consensus. Each child tries to gesture like the others and a communal language is born.

As straightforward as this list sounds, it provides many ideas for exploration and is likely to be cited many times in future discussions on this blog. We also have to be careful and not automatically assume that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in this story. That doctrine is no longer held by biologists and we should not suppose that speech must have originated in the same way, but the identification of four drives that have actually led to the creation of a new language by children must be considered a great achievement and one that should provide much guidance to discussions on this blog.

Comments

[TLTB]

The view is very in line (though somewhat covertly) with the Chomskyan view. Chomsky would (I think) relabel (1) as 'recursion' (which he takes to underlie our linguistic and musical abilities) and (3) as the residue of Universal Grammar and would agree with the rest.

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BLOGGER: I think this is a misreading of the account, especially about the first point. It is more about periodicity than recursion, but I want to get a fuller grasp of the concept myself before making many firm statements.