> What did that look like? How did they make themselves understood before they shared a language? And how do those first few pantomime-like gestures transform into actual language, conveying an infinite array of concepts?
I was born in Kuwait, where my father worked at the local university, so as an older preschooler I was free to roam the campus just like the other kids(it was the 90s) there who represented a whole spectrum of backgrounds.
Truth be told we didn't have a need to talk to each other too much and it wasn't really a barrier to playing together.
A lot of the activities emerged spontaneously - if two kids who happened to share a language (usually siblings) started doing something, like digging a hole or building a tower out of bricks left by construction workers, others would join and try to produce a coherent result together.
For complex communication I relied on my older sister, but eventually acquired enough English vocabulary to become independent in this regard.
My number one frustration was written speech because, well, at the time I couldn't write in any language, including my own.
I'm annoyed by the use of quotations around the word language in the title. This isn't "language", it's language. The use of quotations on the word delegitimizes what is being developed here, likely (in my opinion) due to bias against Signed languages.
The original paper doesn't use quotations. That's an addition from the author.
I interpreted the quotes as implying that the children hadn’t developed a full human language, but rather the rudimentary beginnings of one. Independently of whether it’s signed or spoken.
(You are indeed correct that sign languages are full-blown languages, not just re-encodings of the local spoken language as many people think.)
But that's not what (scanning back through the article) the author used quotation marks for. They mostly talk about children forming a sort of pigeon in a laboratory setup.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I like the experimental design.
This reminds me of the economics "experiments" which claim that money is universal because prisoners spontaneously use cigarettes at currency. However, the prisoners already have a motion of money from their time outside of prison, so are well conditioned to reimplement a money system in their new environment.
Likewise, the kids in this study already have language (and even a shared language, German) from their daily lives.
One of the fascinating parts of the NSL story is that many of the participants did /not/ have a language beforehand.
There's even a radiolab interview with an NSL speaker who didn't have language for 27 years:
'He said he can't think the way he used to think. When I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. "I don't know. I don't remember."'
I've seen the term "cognitive artifact" or "cognitive tool" used before, in the sense of a technique or trick that, once known, transforms a person's abilities and even ability to think. It tends to permeate everything. Arithmetic is an example. Looking at the terrain and being able to abstract that to a map, whether mental or in the dirt/on paper, is another example. "Categorization" is probably one - putting things into abstract classes and sticking a label on them. Artifact is an interesting choice of word for it; human-made and passed like a material object. Yet children tend to learn them so young, we can't imagine how we thought before we knew them.
Written language, I think, is clearly in this category. Humans have had the physiology necessary for reading/writing for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. And yet we did not write. In recent history, individuals from non-literate societies simply exposed, without intimate detail, to the idea of writing, have gone and invented their own writing system shortly after. (The Cherokee alphabet is probably such a development.)
What if spoken and sign language are like that? In discussions of the origins of human language, it is often framed as if an individual acquired a genetic mutation that allowed modern language usage and so they started speaking. But what if humans had the physiology necessary for a long time, but only made limited vocalizations, until someone or some group made the necessary mental leap, and so developed the process of abstraction and seemingly-infinite recursion that language allows? What if they successfully communicated it to others, and every human alive now is, in effect, culturally and mentally descended from them and their insight, unable to escape it even if we wanted to?
Okay, that's really fascinating that the older NSL speakers don't have Theory of Mind (something typically seen emerging around 5 years old) but the younger ones do.
There is a longer section on the (dis-)connection between thinking and language in the second chapter of Oliver Sacks’ “Seeing Voices” (1989) including accounts by Deaf people, psychological research and philosophical ideas.
Thorny Games has a very interesting RPG[1] that's patterned after the Nicaraguan Sign Language 'experiment'. I don't know how authentic the RPG experience is to that of the Nicaraguans, but I did very much enjoy how the RPG pulled some of these threads together.
If you liked the article, you might enjoy reading "Gesture and the nature of language" (Armstrong/Stokoe/Wilcox), suggesting that language developed both signed and spoken and that grammar in particular relates to these signed origins .
FYI, one of the papers in "The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design" talked about the evolution of languages (pidgins/creoles). It's short, and You can read it here:
The article is "Interface and the Evolution of Pidgins" by Thomas Erickson, Apple ATG.
I'm sure there are bigger texts about it now. In fact, there are likely multiple books if you search. But this is an interesting article from the old days.
Depending on the pet some have grown up with and the animal sounds google search has played for them, they fill in the blanks with those sounds and keep playing without any interrupt .
I was born in Kuwait, where my father worked at the local university, so as an older preschooler I was free to roam the campus just like the other kids(it was the 90s) there who represented a whole spectrum of backgrounds.
Truth be told we didn't have a need to talk to each other too much and it wasn't really a barrier to playing together.
A lot of the activities emerged spontaneously - if two kids who happened to share a language (usually siblings) started doing something, like digging a hole or building a tower out of bricks left by construction workers, others would join and try to produce a coherent result together.
For complex communication I relied on my older sister, but eventually acquired enough English vocabulary to become independent in this regard.
My number one frustration was written speech because, well, at the time I couldn't write in any language, including my own.