Corralling Reality

I caught an interesting piece on Radio Four two or three days ago, on the programme Naturebang: the thrust of it was ultimately about language acquisition. The initial topic visited was the song of the Australian Zebra Finch, which like that of many species of songbirds is now considered to have some manner of linguistic purpose: for the males - the female apparently does not sing - to find a mate. Their song is also known to be both social and individual, with each successive generation of a colony or population of the birds learning the songs of their elders and as they grow, inventing variations and enhancements of their own. Research has shown that some males of the species, for whatever reason, grow up isolated from their communities and don’t learn their ‘tribal’ song from their elders, developing only as far as a dissonant ‘proto-song’. This usually leads to them not finding a mate, as the only ‘song’ they can produce fails to impress most females, and many of these proto-vocalic individuals remain isolated throughtout their lives. However, some females are not entirely put off by this lack of vocal prowess and mate with one of these loners to produce offspring, which will often join an established population of their kind. These offspring learn from their vocalic peers and develop vocal skills as normal, inventing and disseminating their own variants as they go.

This struck the non-ornithologists on the panel of the programme as quite extraordinary, and led to the [scripted, obviously] point where one of their number posited the thought experiment: what if we could raise human babies in such linguistic isolation: what would be the outcome? Despite their common agreement on the fact that no sane or remotely moral person could ever contemplate such an abomination in the cause of scientific curiosity, one member of the panel revealed that there was [accidental] precedent for such a study. After the Sandanista junta of the late seventies/early eighties deposed the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, there appeared a large cohort of deaf children, who, under the regime, had largely been ignored by society and raised at home, without education and unable to communicate with anyone; parents, peers or otherwise. It turned out that when these children were sent to school, they fell into a pattern of cooperative learning from and with their peers, and soon adopted a sign language of their own making, with the younger children coming up behind them also learning and then adapting that [entirely new and un-given] language; adding their own contributions to it. In the words of the linguist who was there to see it happen, she was actually present at the birth of an entirely new language as it was being made, entirely spontaneously, by the cohort itself. Nicaraguan sign language came about within one single generation without external input from the hearing. Remarkable...