Question

These questions are about the Nicaraguan Sign Language Senghas (2004) article.

1.) What is the theoretical postion on the Nicaraguan Sign Language?

2.) What are the 2 properties of language focused on in the Senghas (2004) article? Can you explain what each of them are and why they are important?

3.) How many NSL signers were studied in each of the 3 cohorts that were sampled

a.)How did their linguistic environments differ?

b.)How did their signs differ?

4.)What do you think NSL helps us understand about language development?

Answer 1

A Nicaraguan sign language is a designed feature of language as recognized by Hockett.

Humans are capable of representations that lack the properties such as non-linguistic representations like maps and paintings. This derives the structure in such a manner that the patterns in the representation correspond, part for part, to patterns in the thing represented.

In this way, half a city map represents half a city.

Unlike language, these non-linguistic representations are typically analog and holistic.

Over the past 25 years, a sign language developed within a community of deaf Nicaraguans. These deaf children and people lacked exposure to a developed language resulting in the lack of understanding.

This situation enables the discovery of how fundamental language properties emerge as the non-linguistic becomes linguistic.

The study examined the emergence of two types of temporal language in NSL that compared the linguistic devices for conveying temporal information among three sequential age cohorts of signers. The signers could communicate about linearly ordered discrete events in the process.

As a product of individual minds interacting within their community, the temporal language emerges over generations of language transmission.

Deaf people have often developed “home signs” that exhibit some of the rudiments of the language. These communication systems were developed out of common gestures used within family. The home sign systems developed by Nicaraguans appear to have varied widely from one deaf person to another. This system turned out to be of extensive help that it lead to the elementary school and a vocational school for special education for deaf in Managua.

There are about 800 deaf signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), which are from the age of 4 to 45 years of age.

The present study compares the signed expressions of 30 deaf Nicaraguans, grouped into cohorts of 10 persons according to the year that they were first exposed to NSL.

In the study, their signed expressions are compared to the gestures produced while speaking Spanish.

These gestures and signs worked as raw materials to frame this sign language.

The rapid restructuring of Nicaraguan Sign Language while it passed through cohorts of learners shows that even where the discrete and hierarchical combination are absent from the language environment, human learning abilities are capable of creating them anew.