Author Note

This paper was peer edited by classmate Jamie Cormier on December 13th, 2017.

Different sign languages have several distinct origins, structures, and meanings. No two sign languages use the exact same gestures, and we can see this by studying the core properties. Through the comparison of British Sign Language and Nicaraguan Sign Language, we realize that each is unique in their own way. There are three aspects of these languages I would like to touch upon: 1) the origin of their gestures, 2) combinatorial patterning, or in other words, the way hands are manipulated when describing motion/action, and 3) the differences between children’s ability to grasp language versus adults’ ability to grasp language.

To give a brief background, Nicaraguan Sign Language is a new language that was created by deaf Nicaraguans over twenty-five years ago (Senghas et. al., 2004). Before this, deaf Nicaraguans lacked exposure to a developed language (Senghas et. al., 2004). During the 1970’s, deaf Nicaraguans did not socialize because they had no way of communicating with each other. Only a small number of schools and clinics provided services for these deaf Nicaraguans. (From what we can base off of previous research, we know that if a human’s ability to communicate is delayed or nonexistent, they have a harder time logically and intellectually processing information. For example, the feral child “Genie,” who was born in 1957, grew up without learning any language. When she was rescued from her abusive home at age 13, she showed a lack in cognitive ability. She couldn’t put together full sentences, she explored the world around her like an animal would, her number of sleep spindles indicated the same number that appear in people with brain damage, and she did not know how to put her feelings into words (Top Documentary Films, 1997)). As the years went on, schools started opening up for special education, deaf students started making contact outside of school, and the Nicaraguan Sign Language was born.

The British Sign Language consists of gestures, body language, and facial expressions (Sign Community, n.d.). This specific sign language is used exclusively with Britain and it is part of BANZSL, which stands for British, Australian, and New Zealand sign language (Sign Community, n.d.). All three of these languages are derived from the 19th century form of British Sign Language (Sign Community, n.d.). In 2003, the British Sign Language was officially recognized as a minority language (Sign Community, n.d.). However, there is some diversity among the British Sign Language. Just as the Nicaraguan Sign Language initially varied among families (Senghas et. al., 2004), the British Sign Language varies among regions of Britain. A deaf person from southern England could have difficulties communicating with someone from Scotland because their languages may be slightly different from each other (Sign Community, n.d.). It’s like comparing slang in different regions of the United States. Someone from Texas may not understand the use of a word by someone from Boston, Massachusetts. Branching off of British Sign Language is Sign Supported Language. Sign Supported Language is used within Britain and utilizes the same signs as British Sign Language but is not an official language. It supports spoken English with sign language and it is used mostly by hearing people while they communicate with deaf individuals (Sign Community, n.d.). British Sign Language and Nicaraguan Sign Language come from two different countries and used by two different communities, but both provide stimulating and useful research for the psychology of language.

The origin of gesture is an extremely interesting topic because we realize that humans are capable of creating their own language from scratch, which is an amazing ability. As previously stated, deaf Nicaraguans had an extremely hard time communicating with each other during the 1970’s due to lack of support and resources. Because schools and clinics did not cater to these individuals, they were abandoned in their own, silent world. Not surprisingly, deaf Nicaraguans began to develop their own version of “home signs”, which was a communication system built up out of common gestures used mostly with family members (Senghas et. al., 2004). When deaf Nicaraguans students would go home after school, they would need to communicate with their family somehow. These “home signs” acted as a way to relay needs and wants from the students to their families. The first home signs exhibited the rudiments of language, but the gestures varied greatly from one deaf person to another in form and complexity (Senghas et. al., 2004). This limitation makes sense because these signs were being used only within individual households. In 1977, an expanded elementary school for special education opened. Four years later in 1981, a vocational school opened and catered to deaf students. By 1981, 200 deaf students were enrolled in this vocational school. As a result of the opening of these schools, deaf students began contacting each other outside of the classroom, and by the mid 1980’s, adolescents were hanging out on the weekends (Senghas et. al., 2004). Children began to develop a new, gestural system for communicating with each other, which eventually became an early sign language (Senghas et. al., 2004). This form of sign language and its gestures were passed down through generations and naturally relearned every year (Senghas et. al., 2004). In a study by Marshall and Morgan (2015), gestures of the British Sign Language were investigated. What they studied were called entity classifiers, which are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space (Marshall & Morgan, 2015). The researchers proposed that these classifiers emerged in the British Sign Language (and other sign languages) because they are “conventionalized forms of iconic gesture used by hearing people, who were frequently the initial communication partners of deaf people” (Marshall & Morgan, 2015). In this study, BSL learners and natives were asked to describe pictures in BSL and without speech. Learners had difficulty using conventional BSL handshapes when describing location and orientation and often used both signs and gestures while not sure which handshape to use (Marshall & Morgan, 2015). In contrast to this, when the learners were asked to comprehend a signer’s classifier partnered with a picture, they were successful. In conclusion, learners of the British Sign Language are more successful at comprehending gestures rather than exhibiting them. These gestures, as believed by some researchers, have been “recreolized” (formed from the contact of two languages) each generation (Marshall & Morgan, 2015). In contrast to those of the Nicaraguan Sign Language where the language was developed by deaf individuals, adult learners of British Sign Language bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to task the understanding and producing of entity classifiers (Marshall & Morgan, 2015). In British Sign Language, gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign language (Marshall & Morgan, 2015).

From the origin of gestures, to use of action signs, British Sign Language and Nicaraguan Sign Language both provide plenty of information to compare and contrast. Let’s take a look at NSL. In Senghas et al.’s study (2004), thirty Nicaraguans were asked to sign a narrative of an animated cartoon story that they watched. The cartoon portrayed a cat rolling rapidly down a steep hill right after swallowing a bowling ball. About one third of the deaf signers signed this narrative with an integrated approach. This means that they signed the manner and path of the cat at the same time (manner being rolling and path being down the hill). About two thirds of the deaf signers expressed these actions separately, signing the manner first (roll) and then the path afterwards (shooting down) (Senghas et. al., 2004). These movements of their hands and body are derived from a gestural source (Senghas et. al., 2004). This is an amazing milestone of NSL because younger deaf signers started separating two components of an action, which had not been done frequently before. Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired the combinatorial nature that is the hallmark of language (Senghas et. al., 2004). Some British Sign Language sentences explicitly encode direction of motion, and there is evidence that the richer contextual information provided by BSL sentences versus written or spoken English reduces the need for action stimulation in comprehension (Vinson et. al., 2017). BSL uses a variety of structures to represent action, such as the “constructed action”, where the signer uses his or her body (the head, face, arms, and torso) to represent thoughts, feelings, or actions of a referent (Cormier et. al., 2013). Another structure known as “depicting constructions” uses the hands to represent location and motion of an entity (Cormier et. al., 2013). In a study by Cormier et al. (2013), children who knew BSL were shown cartoon clips containing the two actions just stated. The participants were asked to watch the cartoons and explain what happened to other deaf native signers. The adult signers used simultaneous constructions in the predicate structures (in this case, the verb) more frequently than the child signers did in their narrative description. They also combined lexical and non-lexical elements. In other words, adults used more “constructed actions” accompanied with lexical items. This brings me into my next topic: adults versus children.

As we can see from the study by Senghas et al. (2004), children and adults have different ways of communicating motion. It was shown that children analyze complex events into basic elements and sequence these events into hierarchically structured expressions according to principles not observed in gestures accompanying speech in the surrounding language (Senghas et. al., 2004). The proposal for this study was that the recombination of the language reflects mechanisms with which children learn (Senghas et. al., 2004). So, children naturally possess learning abilities capable of giving language its fundamental structure (Senghas et. al., 2004). If we look at the groups of participants in this study, ten were born before 1984 (group 1), ten were born between 1984 and 1993 (group 2), and ten were born after 1993 (group 3). All of them had been signing since the age of six. Signers from groups two and three (the younger ones) used less of an integration approach and more of a separation approach. The older signers signed manner and path simultaneously. These younger children broke down verb expressions into sequential morphemes (Senghas et. al., 2004). I am not concluding that children possess a skill that adults do not, but I am concluding that children have the ability to create languages anew. As we see with British Sign Language, deaf native adult signers use non-lexical forms of “constructed actions” and “depicting constructions” simultaneously or sequentially with lexical elements to predicate referents’ actions in narratives (Cormier et. al., 2013). Children on the other hand preferred non-combinatorial constructions (Cormier et. al., 2013). However, there is a difference between these two studies while comparing BLS and NSL. With NSL, this milestone of dividing actions into separate elements is considered impressive and the young participants are praised for what they have done with the language. In contrast, the article about BSL explains that children do not and cannot use “constructed actions” and “depicted constructions” simultaneously because it may take them more time to master due to their young age and immaturity (Cormier et. al., 2013). The findings for these two articles are similar, but the conclusions and discussions they produce are in contradiction with each other.

The comparison of these two, very different, languages provide insight into language acquisition. It is obvious that language acquisition is a natural ability that humans are able to grasp easily. However, the way in which language is produced varies among regions of the world and among ages of those who produce it. There is still much we can learn and much to be studied. About 70 million deaf people use sign language as their first language, and many different sign languages can share the same linguistic roots (WFD, n.d.). Although sign language is not international, many signs that are used among different sign languages are universal. This creates a connection amongst those of different languages. Some say that signed languages have evolved from spoken languages that surround them. However, even isolated deaf individuals have been shown to develop their own sign language (WFD, n.d.). “No culture can emerge without language and no language can emerge without culture” (WFD, n.d.). Each has an influence on the other. Languages like BSL and NSL are influenced by their cultural changes in which they were originated. However, both languages share common roots that act as a bridge for all other languages.

Sources Cited

Cormier, K., Smith, S., & Sevcikova, Z. (2013). Predicate structures, gesture, and simultaneity in the representation of action in British Sign Language: Evidence from deaf children and adults. Journal Of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 18(3), 370-390. doi:10.1093/deafed/ent020

Marshall, C. R., & Morgan, G. (2015). From gesture to sign language: Conventionalization of classifier constructions by adult hearing learners of British sign language. Topics In Cognitive Science, 7(1), 61-80. doi:10.1111/tops.12118

(n.d.). Retrieved November 28, 2017, from https://www.signcommunity.org.uk/a-brief-history-of-british-sign-language-bsl.html

Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Ozyurek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305, 1779-1782

Top Documentary Films. (1997). Genie: Secret of the wild child. [Video file]. Retrieved from        https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/genie-secret-wild-child/

Vinson, D., Perniss, P., Fox, N., & Vigliocco, G. (2017). Comprehending sentences with the body: Action compatibility in British Sign Language?. Cognitive Science, 41(Suppl 6), 1377-1404. doi:10.1111/cogs.12397

World Federation of the Deaf. (n.d.). Sign language. Retrieved from https://wfdeaf.org/human-       rights/crpd/sign-language/