Watching a “language” develop when kids can’t speak to each other (2019)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
The original paper doesn't use quotations. That's an addition from the author.
(You are indeed correct that sign languages are full-blown languages, not just re-encodings of the local spoken language as many people think.)
A language, in other words.
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."'
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?
https://archive.org/details/artofhumancomput00laur/page/10/m...
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.