Our research examines the linguistic, cognitive, and environmental conditions that give rise to natural language, in individuals and at the community level. The primary objective is to understand the abilities all human learners apply to language acquisition, and how those abilities change with age. The project centers on a generation of deaf Nicaraguan children and adults whose initial language environment included no previously developed sign language. When their community first formed in the late 1970s, this first generation began to create a new sign language, and in doing so acquired something more than what was available in their language environment. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) continues to develop and change as new cohorts of children enter the community and learn the language from older peers. By using targeted elicitation and communication tasks to systematically compare each cohort to the one that preceded it, the proposed research program will investigate developments in areas central to the grammar of this emerging language, particularly the individual grammatical elements (e.g., words and morphemes), and the conventions for combining them into complex constructions (including word order and spatial devices). Together these comparisons will help reveal how human learners create, organize, and systematize language information, and how these abilities vary with age.

Public Health Relevance

This research addresses a question central to the issue of optimal learning environments for children. That is, in which areas is a rich environment crucial for full language development, and in which areas are children and able to make up for environmental gaps? The results will inform both researchers and clinicians about the complex interplay between natural human language abilities, the language environment, and language learning outcomes.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DC005407-10
Application #
8511597
Study Section
Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM)
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2002-07-01
Project End
2014-07-31
Budget Start
2013-08-01
Budget End
2014-07-31
Support Year
10
Fiscal Year
2013
Total Cost
$223,696
Indirect Cost
$68,871
Name
Barnard College
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
068119601
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10027
Coppola, Marie; Senghas, Ann (2017) Is it language (yet)? The allure of the gesture-language binary. Behav Brain Sci 40:e50
Kocab, Annemarie; Senghas, Ann; Snedeker, Jesse (2016) The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition 156:147-163
Goldin-Meadow, S; Brentari, D; Coppola, M et al. (2015) Watching language grow in the manual modality: nominals, predicates, and handshapes. Cognition 136:381-95
Horton, L; Goldin-Meadow, S; Coppola, M et al. (2015) Forging a morphological system out of two dimensions: Agentivity and number. Open Linguist 1:596-613
Kocab, Annemarie; Pyers, Jennie; Senghas, Ann (2014) Referential shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: a transition from lexical to spatial devices. Front Psychol 5:1540
Richie, Russell; Yang, Charles; Coppola, Marie (2014) Modeling the emergence of lexicons in homesign systems. Top Cogn Sci 6:183-95
Rabagliati, Hugh; Senghas, Ann; Johnson, Scott et al. (2012) Infant rule learning: advantage language, or advantage speech? PLoS One 7:e40517
Flaherty, Molly; Senghas, Ann (2011) Numerosity and number signs in deaf Nicaraguan adults. Cognition 121:427-36
Senghas, Ann (2011) The Emergence of Two Functions for Spatial Devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Hum Dev 53:287-302
Pyers, Jennie E; Shusterman, Anna; Senghas, Ann et al. (2010) Evidence from an emerging sign language reveals that language supports spatial cognition. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 107:12116-20

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