The Resilience of Language

"I’ve been a fan of Susan Goldin-Meadow’s work for a long, long time. She has been working with profoundly deaf kids for about 40 years now. What she’s interested in figuring out is the kind of language you get when there is nothing in the way of linguistic input early on. All these children can see is their hearing parents’ gestures and they obviously have this deep need to communicate that all humans have. What kind of language do they end up with? Are the properties of those language like the properties of language in general? And if so, could those properties have been learned from the parents’ gestures? Over and over again, she’s shown, pretty convincingly, that there are properties in the kids’ signings that are very language-like, but which are not in the parents’ gestures. Where does that come from? If it’s not ‘out there,’ what the kids are experiencing, where does it come from? Goldin-Meadow’s idea is that it comes from the mind of the children. This, of course, is an idea that fits very well with the general Chomskyan perspective that I take, which is that there’s something about us, that’s common to all humans, which is this capacity to combine meaningful elements and create larger meanings out of them in a very systematic way. In The Resilience of Language she takes 20 or 30 years of her experimental work and shows her journey in exploring that. The book is beautifully written and it does have some complex linguistics in it, but it’s a really interesting question it’s asking. You have to nuance what it comes out with in the end—we have to be careful, because you don’t want to draw too strong conclusions—but it’s a fascinating book. In English, and many other languages, if we use a word like ‘that’ or ‘this,’ we combine it with a noun. So you say ‘this cup’ or ‘that banana’ or ‘those books’ and they create what linguists call a ‘constituent’—a little unit of language built out of two smaller units. Each of those small units has its own meaning and the larger unit then puts those meanings together to give you something new. So if you look at the gestures of the hearing parents of profoundly deaf children, they certainly use pointing to do something like the word ‘this’ or ‘that’ in English. So they’ll go, ‘This is white’ or ‘That’s tasty’ and point at stuff. And they might make symbols for things: they might make a love heart for ‘I love you’. But what they don’t do, according to Goldin-Meadow’s data, is put them together. If you’re gesturing and pointing at that cup, it’s weird to say that you have two separate units: ‘that’ as well as ‘cup,’ because you’re just pointing at that one thing. The hearing parents don’t do that in their gesturing. They might make a cup gesture, and they might point, but they don’t combine them. But the children Susan Goldin-Meadow was studying do put the two together, just like you would in English. They do the ‘that’ signal and the cup signal. So you get these two things, which are not found together in the gestures of the parents, but are found together in other languages. The kids put those two things with their independent meanings together into a single unit. Where are they learning to do that from? They can’t be learning it from what they’re seeing, because that’s not what their parents or caregivers are doing. So why are they doing it? That’s one really fascinating example, and her book is full of them. Right. At the point when they’re doing this, they don’t have English at all. These are kids who will normally learn through signing and later on, when they have the skills, they might be taught English as a purely written language."