In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

REVIEW ARTICLE LANGUAGE: GENE-CREATED OR HANDMADE? William C.Stokoe In a doctoral dissertation,' Ann Senghas has examined the signing behavior of older and younger deaf people in Nicaragua , where it is alleged there was no education for deaf children and no sign language before 1980 (Kegl, Senghas & Coppola 1995). She views the development there of a sign language , or two sign languages, over the last fifteen years as a unique opportunity to observe children creating language out of nothing, because their deafness naturally deprives them of (spoken) language input. The dissertation is thus in a tradition of sign language research at least as old as the report by Goldin -Meadow and Feldman (1975): "The Creation of a Communication System." What Senghas reports, in keeping with this tradition, supports the theory that language comes from innate, abstract knowledge; and specifically, that the differences between LSN (Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragiiense) used by older deaf signers and ISN (Idioma de Signos Nicaragilense) result from the younger signers' use of their innate knowledge of universal grammar to create new grammatical features. The line of argument is familiar. It does not disprove, however , an alternative theory-that language began with the evolution of the species, and begins again in each individual all over again, whenever two irresistible forces combine. One is 1.Senghas, A.1995. Children's Contribution to the Birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Ph.D. dissertation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain &Cognitive Sciences, S. Pinker adviser. @1995, Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 Stokoe the demand for immediate social interaction with parents, later with others; the other is the equally powerful, gene-guided, demand for the human brain to develop continually from birth onward and notjust during normal gestation. These two forces under other names are the social aspect and the biological aspect of the universal imperative nature imposes on every organism to mature and function. The fundamental virtue of this alternative theory is that it takes account of the present state of biological and neurological knowledge. Vision and all the other sensory systems have to be developed by actual experience before they can map or model the world. (see Sebeok 1994, Sacks 1995:ch. 4). Also the modeling of events in the world-which requires the developed senses, the neuromotor mechanisms, movement, hands on experience, and eventually integration of everything into a symbolic system of communicating-all this has to be developed; none of it is inborn. The discoveries of biochemist Gerald Edelman, of neuropsychologist Doreen Kimura, and of neurobiologist Semir Zeki make it impossible to believe that a newborn's brain could have in it special rules just for grammar when we know that many months of experience and experiment are needed to develop all the rest of what it takes to be fully human. Some of the arguments put forward for the putative prewired modular brain are at best unconvincing and at worst downright questionable. For instance, at the 1995 Linguistic Institute in Albuquerque, M. Gopnik reported on a specific genetic defect in some children that makes them unable to inflect verbs but imposes no other impairment. However, Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and others at Great Ormond St. Hospital for Children in London had been working for some time with the extended family when Gopnik came upon some of the children , briefly administered tests, and went to press. The Ormond Hospital team's study of three generations of this family has copious data, which includes solid evidence that the verbconjugating anomaly is only a small part of functional problems that include more general language impairment. SLS 89 Created or handmade? An alternate hypothesis to account for the differences in the LSN and ISN signers would run something like the following: The older deaf signers in Nicaragua grew up at a time when their environment contained only hearing people (who no doubt gestured or gesticulated as everyone else does while conversing and parenting). In order to participate in social interaction these children used gestures ("homesign" inSenghas), both gestures they observed and gestures they improvised as their communication with others grew more and more effective. (So far, this either states fact or can be disproved.) These older signers, being...

pdf