Exploring the Origins of Language

Marie Coppola studies gesture systems developed by deaf people with no access to conventional sign language.

<p>Marie Coppola, assistant professor of psychology, makes the sign for "pay". Photo by Jessica Tommaselli</p>
Marie Coppola, assistant professor of psychology, makes the sign for "pay". Photo by Jessica Tommaselli

High atop a mountain in a small village in rural Nicaragua, Marie Coppola is having a conversation with a deaf teenager.

At first glance, the two seem to have little common ground – a distinguished American professor of psychology and linguistics and a young Nicaraguan boy gesturing fluidly in a sign language only he and a handful of people in the world are able to understand.

But they are able to communicate nonetheless, with Coppola relying on her experience and research into the small “homesign” systems scattered about Nicaragua to interpret the boy’s gestures and respond accordingly.

It is – she says – an exhilarating experience.

The research is captured in this video clip:

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMCwf9Wlrg8′]

Coppola’s research into the unique homesign systems used by deaf individuals in remote areas of Nicaragua who do not have access to a conventional sign language is itself a fascinating subject. But Coppola and her colleagues – Ann Senghas at Barnard College of Columbia University and Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago – are taking their quest one step further, using the knowledge they gather to explore the roots of the human species’ desire to communicate.

“As humans, we are driven to communicate in ways that other species are not,” Coppola says. “All animals communicate to some extent. But they don’t do it in a structured way, where they talk about things that aren’t in the here and now. Your dog communicates with you. But he would never tell you about something that happened last Wednesday.”

<p>A signer of Nicaraguan Sign Language, center, with her mother, left, and researcher Marie Coppola outside Esteli, Nicaragua. Courtesy of Marie Coppola</p>
A signer of Nicaraguan Sign Language, center, with her mother, left, and researcher Marie Coppola outside Esteli, Nicaragua. Courtesy of Marie Coppola

Many people have explored how children acquire language. But children typically are surrounded by and immersed in a rich linguistic environment in which they learn the meaning of words and the rules of grammar by interacting with those around them.

Coppola is one of only a handful of scientists in the world exploring how and why human beings communicate when that natural input is taken away.

“My daughter is hearing us speak English in the house so she’s going to acquire English. That’s not a big surprise,” says Coppola, the mother of a nine-month-old infant. “But if you’re a homesigner who is not exposed to any language model would it be that surprising if you didn’t produce communication that looked like language? Why should they? Yet they do. They are just driven to do it, and I think that reflects our natural endowment as humans for language and communication.

“We are the only species that produces complex language or indeed any language-like communication in the absence of specific training,” Coppola continues. “Other Great Apes have some ability to link symbols with concepts, but they don’t do that naturally – their spontaneous communications tend to have simple forms and to cover a limited range of domains such as eating, mating, or playing. Genetically, we’re not that different. So what happened? Why was this advantage conferred on us?”

<p>A former child homesigner who is now learning Nicaraguan Sign Language at a school north of Managua. Courtesy of Marie Coppola</p>
A former child homesigner who is now learning Nicaraguan Sign Language at a school north of Managua. Courtesy of Marie Coppola

Coppola is a native signer of American Sign Language who was raised by Deaf parents. She capitalizes the word “Deaf” in describing her parents in order to raise awareness about the cultural identity of the Deaf community. Coppola says that while her parents are audiologically deaf, they identify themselves as members of Deaf culture: i.e., they share a language with the Deaf community, identify not as disabled but as a cultural and linguistic minority, and participate in cultural events such as plays, social events, etc. It is, for Coppola and many others, an extremely important distinction.

Coppola got into her research field when she was a research assistant at MIT in the mid-1990s. Senghas was a graduate student at MIT at the time, working on cognitive science and sign language emergence in Nicaragua as part of her dissertation. She says working with Senghas was a “transformative experience” and she quickly realized the work was her calling.

The Nicaraguan individuals Coppola studies are unique in that they were raised in areas that are extremely isolated and do not have a pre-existing sign language for them to learn to communicate. So the individuals had to invent their own sign language, which was shared only among their immediate family and friends.

And yet, Coppola says, her research has found some similarities in the small homesigning systems used by the four individuals she has studied for more than 10 years. It is the structures common to these unrelated homesign systems that are also characteristic of the world’s languages in general, whose origins Coppola seeks to understand.

“These homesign systems are gesture systems that deaf individuals invent so they can communicate with the hearing people around them,” Coppola says. “That’s not to say they don’t have any input. They obviously interact with people; they interact with objects; they participate in their cultures. But they can’t hear the language that is being spoken around them and they aren’t exposed to a sign language. So what they see are the gestures hearing people use while they are speaking, that are not themselves linguistic, but that can be recruited as raw materials to build a language-like system. Studying how they do that forms a large part of my research program.”

Coppola says she thinks of herself as a developmental psycholinguist: “I’m studying how language develops from a psychological perspective. A linguist studies the structure of a language. The object of the study is the language. For me, the object of the study is the person using the language. I’m using psychological methods to elicit language samples from homesigners [by asking them to describe things] and then I use those data to understand not only the underlying structure of the language – that’s the linguistic part – but also how our learning mechanisms and how our brains interact with that language structure, especially when it’s not there in the environment. Homesigners are creating new language structures that didn’t exist before. It is our psychology, our endowment as humans, that allows us to do that.”

Coppola discussed her research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in San Diego in February 2010, and she will give a presentation at the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in mid-April 2010.