Nicaraguan Sign Language: A new fossil record of age-of-acquisition effects

Ann Senghas, Barnard College

Over the past 30 years, a new sign language has emerged among deaf children and adolescents brought together in schools for special education in Managua, Nicaragua. The emergence of this language provides an opportunity to observe how language form and structure arise. What began as gestural communication among 50 children has developed into a rich, natural language with over 1000 users. With each wave of new learners, the language was shaped by the learning abilities of individuals of different ages, and by their patterns of interaction with each other.

Can this process create structured language from unstructured input? To answer this question, we followed developments in NSL within various linguistic domains, including the expression of motion events, the expression of spatial location, and the identification of arguments. The data reveal that, as the language was learned and relearned, the holistic, continuous forms found in gestures were not retained. Instead, this analog signal was reanalyzed into simple, elemental building blocks that were then recombined into complex new patterns. These augmentative effects that took place in the mid-1980s have left an imprint, still evident in differences between successive age cohorts today.