New Nicaraguan Sign Language
Shows How Language Affects Thought
Discovermagazine.com
In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan
schoolchildren invented a new language. The
kids were the first to enroll in Nicaragua’s
new wave of special education schools. At
first, they struggled with the schools’
focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they
found companionship in each other.
It was the first time that deaf people from
all over the country could gather in large
numbers and through their interactions – in
the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign
Language (NSL) spontaneously came into
being.
NSL is not a direct translation of Spanish –
it is a language in its own right, complete
with its own grammar and vocabulary. Its
child inventors created it naturally by
combining and adding to gestures that they
had used at home. Gradually, the language
became more regular, more complex and
faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine
for scientists, providing an unparalleled
opportunity to study the emergence of a new
language. And in a new study led by Jennie
Pyers from Wellesley College, it even tells
us how language shapes our thought.
By studying children who learned NSL at
various stages of its development, Pyers has
shown that the vocabulary they pick up
affects the way they think. Specifically,
those who learned NSL before it developed
specific gestures for left and right perform
more poorly on a spatial awareness test than
children who grew up knowing how to sign
those terms.
The idea that language affects thought isn’t
new. It’s encapsulated by the ‘Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis’, which suggests that differences
in the languages we speak affect the way we
think and behave. Typically, scientists test
this link between language and thought by
either comparing people who speak different
languages, or by watching children as they,
and their linguistic skills, develop. But
both approaches have problems. Speakers of
different languages also vary in many other
ways that can affect the way they think,
while growing children are also developing
in many other aspects of their mental
skills, which could confuse any effect of
language alone.
But NSL cuts through both of these problems.
Here is a language that was learned by
successive waves of children whose mental
skills were relatively mature, who all came
from the same culture, and who all learned
the language at the same age.
In most sign languages, signers map the
positions of real-world objects using their
hands, rather than using words like ‘left’,
‘inside’ or ‘over’. Someone signing a cat on
a table would place one hand, representing a
cat, over the other, representing the table,
with no separate sign for ‘on’. The same
works for left and right, with the added
rule that usually, the signer represents the
scene from their own perspective.
But NSL hasn’t quite got to that stage yet.
In the first version developed in the 1970s,
the children hadn’t settled on a consistent
way of indicating left and right, and the
locations of objects in their conversations
are fairly ambiguous. The second group of
children to expand NSL in the 1980s had more
specific conventions for position.
Pyers compared the abilities of people from
both groups, now fully grown adults, in two
spatial tests. First, she led them into a
small room with a single red wall. She hid a
token in one corner of the room, blindfolded
the children and spun them around until they
lost their bearings. When she removed the
blindfold, the children had to say where the
token was. The second test, like the first,
involved hiding a token in the corner of a
room, but this time the room was a tabletop
model that was rotated while the children
were blindfolded.
In both tests, the second group of adults
(who learned the more advanced form of NSL)
outperformed the first group. Even though
their memories and ability to understand the
tasks were just as good, the expanded
vocabulary of geographical gestures that
they learned as children also gave them
better spatial abilities well into
adulthood.
By comparing the first group of NSL signers
to typical children, Pyers also learned
something about what’s going on in their
heads. Children find the task easy and
answer quickly but they often make mistakes.
They’ll orient themselves to the geometry of
the room, using the long and short walls to
tell them where the token is. But they tend
to ignore the red wall landmark so when they
make mistakes, they usually go for the
corner diagonally opposite to the correct
one.
The first group of NSL signers were very
different. They were more accurate,
suggesting that their experience and
maturity does at least count for something.
Their mistakes are evenly distributed around
the three other corners, suggesting that
they use neither the landmark nor the room’s
geometry to help them. And they took a long
time over the test and said that they found
it very difficult. They were aware of their
own uncertainty, as adults often are, but
they simply didn’t have a reliable mental
map of the room and its hidden token.
Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers
find these tasks challenging because they do
not have the language to encode the relevant
aspects of the environment that would help
them solve the spatial problem.” She added,
“[They] did not have a consistent linguistic
means to encode ‘left of’.”
This is a fascinating result, especially
since the first group of adults were older
and had been signing for a longer time. It’s
clear evidence that our spatial reasoning
skills depend, to an extent, on consistent
spatial language. If we lack the right
words, our mental abilities are limited in a
way that extra life experience can’t fully
compensate for. Even 30 years of navigating
through the world won’t do the trick. And
they may never catch up, even though the
language they invented has advanced – after
all, some studies with American Sign
Language suggest that people who learn
spatial terms later on in life never master
them.
This is a subtly different idea than the one
espoused by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
which suggests that different languages
influence how speakers think about their
world. By contrast, Pyers’ results focus “on
those aspects of human cognition that are
dependent on acquiring a language, any
language”. She says that the room tasks tap
into a set of mental skills that “crucially
depends on language and that this
relationship between language and spatial
cognition should hold true for speakers of
all languages”.
The Nicaraguan signers may well reveal more
ways in which language fundamentally affects
thought, for other aspects of the language
besides spatial locations became more
complex over time. These include ways of
signifying mental states, and Pyers has
already shown that as these became more
sophisticated, so did the signers’ abilities
to understand the fact that other people can
hold false beliefs. Meanwhile, Ann Senghas
and Molly Flaherty, who worked on the
current study, are looking at how the
emergence of a counting system in NSL
affected the numerical skills of the
signers.
The grand idea behind all of these singular
observations is that as human language
evolved, our mental abilities became
increasingly entwined with linguistic
devices. Those devices are part and parcel
of modern language, and thus modern thought.
NSL, being a new language, is the exception
that proves the rule – as it developed, so
did the abilities of those who learned it,
from their skills at visualising objects in
space to their capacity for understanding
the minds of their peers.
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