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from the dept. A recent study tracked the development of a new sign language among children in Nicaragua. The researchers report the spontaneous emergence of universal lingusitic features among these children over several generations. The researchers focused on expressions for things in motion and found that essential features of language spontaneously emerged over the course of several generations during which the language evolved from primitive gestural signs to discrete segmented terms that break a given motion into, for example, its manner and the path. For example, even though an object rolling down a hill is a holistic unsegmented event, by segmenting terms into "rolling" (manner) and "down" (path) our language allows us to describe more situations with a fewer terms rather than having a unique term for every possible event. For example, we could describe things that are "rolling down" or "spinning down" or "tumbling down" or "rolling up the hill" by unique molecular combinations of atomic terms. The authors observe that such term segmentation and recombination is an essential feature of the machinery of language that they observed spontaneously emerge in a group of children over several generations. < | >
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Is Language Hardwired?
