Children Creating Core Properties of Language: Evidence from an Emerging Sign Language in Nicaragua

TLDR

A new sign language has emerged among deaf Nicaraguans over the past 25 years, offering a rare window into the birth of universal linguistic features. The study aims to explain how children’s early segmentation and recombination of events give rise to the core structure of language. The authors propose that children’s natural ability to segment complex events into basic elements and recombine them hierarchically underlies language acquisition and perpetuation. Children initially dissect complex events into basic elements and sequence them hierarchically, a process that, across successive cohorts, transforms gestural communication into a fully structured linguistic system, demonstrating that children possess innate learning mechanisms that endow language with its fundamental structure.

Abstract

A new sign language has been created by deaf Nicaraguans over the past 25 years, providing an opportunity to observe the inception of universal hallmarks of language. We found that in their initial creation of the language, children analyzed complex events into basic elements and sequenced these elements into hierarchically structured expressions according to principles not observed in gestures accompanying speech in the surrounding language. Successive cohorts of learners extended this procedure, transforming Nicaraguan signing from its early gestural form into a linguistic system. We propose that this early segmentation and recombination reflect mechanisms with which children learn, and thereby perpetuate, language. Thus, children naturally possess learning abilities capable of giving language its fundamental structure.