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      Young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality

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          Abstract

          How the world’s 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community, offering insights into the dynamics of language evolution. However, documenting the emergence of these languages has mostly consisted of studying the end product; the process by which ad hoc signs are transformed into a structured communication system has not been directly observed. Here we show how young children create new communication systems that exhibit core features of natural languages in less than 30 min. In a controlled setting, we blocked the possibility of using spoken language. In order to communicate novel messages, including abstract concepts, dyads of children spontaneously created novel gestural signs. Over usage, these signs became increasingly arbitrary and conventionalized. When confronted with the need to communicate more complex meanings, children began to grammatically structure their gestures. Together with previous work, these results suggest that children have the basic skills necessary, not only to acquire a natural language, but also to spontaneously create a new one. The speed with which children create these structured systems has profound implications for theorizing about language evolution, a process which is generally thought to span across many generations, if not millennia.

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          “John thinks that Mary thinks that…” attribution of second-order beliefs by 5- to 10-year-old children

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            Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure.

            Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex sentences. These properties make language unique among natural communication systems and enable our species to convey an open-ended set of messages. We provide a cultural evolutionary account of the origins of this structure. We show, using simulations of rational learners and laboratory experiments, that structure arises from a trade-off between pressures for compressibility (imposed during learning) and expressivity (imposed during communication). We further demonstrate that the relative strength of these two pressures can be varied in different social contexts, leading to novel predictions about the emergence of structured behaviour in the wild.
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              The development of language-like communication without a language model.

              Deaf children who are unable to acquire oral language naturally and who are not exposed to a standard manual language can spontaneously develop a structured sign system that has many of the properties of natural spoken language. This communication system appears to be largely the invention of the child himself rather than of the caretakers.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                December 02 2019
                : 201904871
                Article
                10.1073/pnas.1904871116
                6926062
                31792169
                f49e2ef3-3d33-42a4-adcd-70aa1772609a
                © 2019

                Free to read

                https://www.pnas.org/site/aboutpnas/licenses.xhtml

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