Deaf kids establish own sign language
By Bruce Bower
Children learn their native language with remarkable ease. This feat has inspired a long-running scientific debate about whether youngsters innately grasp underlying linguistic rules, or grammar, without having to learn them.
In a finding sure to fuel this argument, two psychologists report that successive groups of deaf kids attending a pair of Nicaraguan schools invented their own full-fledged sign language in less than 2 decades.
“Sequential [groups] of interacting children aged 10 and younger collectively possess the capacity not only to learn, but also to create language,” the researchers conclude in the July Psychological Science.