The origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language tells us a lot about language creation

When linguists discovered deaf children in Nicaragua using a sign language they created on their own, researchers had a unique way to study the development of language. Public Radio International takes a look at how this happened here.

Children invented a new sign language

In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language of their own. Here's a BBC video about it.

The decades-long battle over deaf communication in Nicaragua

The world’s only living natural experiment in the creation of language has happened among the deaf in Nicaragua when oralism was replaced by what is now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language—and at the same time ASL was rejected. As Dan Rosenheck discovered, it has fundamentally changed how linguists think about one of civilisation’s greatest mysteries. Read more in an in-depth article from 1843 magazine here.

Guatemalan Boy Get Implant

A 7-year-old boy from the Central American country of Guatemala got his implant turned on yesterday. WANE-TV in Fort Wayne, Indiana has a video report, which is posted below.(Google captions available or read the story here).

A Life Without Words

A new film about the deaf debuts at a UK film fest this Friday (June 22). A Life Without Words will show at the Open City Docs Fest. A Life Without Words tells the story of Dulce Maria and her brother Francisco. Born deaf on a farm in Nicaragua, they have never been more than a few miles from their rural home. Their lives change when visited by a deaf sign language teacher. For more information, click here.

Bronze at PanAm Games

American swimmer Marcus Titus has won a bronze medal at the Pan American Games in the 100-meter breaststroke. The Guadalajara contest was the first event where the deaf swimmer took home a medal in a major competition not restricted to people with disabilities. Earlier in the summer, Titus earned the title of best swimmer at the deaf world championships in Portugal. He took home five gold medals, along with two silver and a bronze. He set deaf world records in the 50m breast, 50m free, and the 100m free. The Tucson, Arizona native is now looking ahead to the 2012 London Olympics.

An Expedition for Education

Andy Bugh is kayaking some 4000 to raise money for deaf education. Bugh hopes to bring in $15,000 to build two new classrooms at a Honduran school in the town of Tegucigalpa for New Life Deaf Ministry, a Christian outreach. His trip started in Brower’s Spring, Montana, the furthest point that water originates and flows to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Red Rock River, the Beaverhead River, the Jefferson River and to the end of the Missouri River. From Plano, Texas, Bugh has a background in construction and works to add classrooms to the school each year. Right now, the school has enough classroom space to provide up to a 6th grade education. For more information, visit here. To see where Bugh is now, click here.

Language and Numbers Study

A study involving the deaf shows langugage to play a critical role in our ability to understand numbers. A team of researchers, lead by the University of Chicago, found deaf people in Nicaragua, who had not learned formal sign language but used homesigns, did not have a complete understanding of numbers greater than three. The deaf who learn a sign language grasped the concept of large numbers because they learned a counting routine early in childhood, just as that learned by children who use spoken languages. There is something about the understanding of relationships that lie beneath the words whether it be spoken language or sign.
The homesigners failed to grasp the succession of numbers, despite knowing, for instance, that eight fingers are more than seven fingers. The researchers determined that living in a culture that used numbers was not enough to gain an understanding of what the numbers represented. That's why the homesigners used the shape and color of money to dertermine which denominations were more valuable than others, rather than from knowing the acutual amounts the coins or paper currencies represented. You can read more about the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is titled Number Without a Language Model.