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shared by Patti Porto on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached

shared by Tero Toivanen on 27 Jun 10 - Cached

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language.
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It was the first time that deaf people from all over the country could gather in large numbers and through their interactions – in the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) spontaneously came into being.
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NSL is not a direct translation of Spanish – it is a language in its own right, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary.
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Its child inventors created it naturally by combining and adding to gestures that they had used at home. Gradually, the language became more regular, more complex and faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine for scientists, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study the emergence of a new language.
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those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.
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The idea that language affects thought isn’t new. It’s encapsulated by the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, which suggests that differences in the languages we speak affect the way we think and behave.
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