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Lisa Stewart

Study: Math Skills Rely on Language, Not Just Logic | Wired Science | Wired.com - 7 views

www.wired.com/...homesigning-numbers

homesigners deafness sign_language math numbers

shared by Lisa Stewart on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Homesigners in Nicaragua are famous among linguists for spontaneously creating a fully formed language when they were first brought together at a school for the deaf in the 1970s. But many homesigners stay at home, where they share a language with no one. Their “home signs” are completely made up, and lack consistent grammar and specific number words.
  • Over the course of three month-long trips to Nicaragua in 2006, 2007 and 2009, Spaepen gave four adult Nicaraguan homesigners a series of tests to see how they handled large numbers. They later gave the same tasks to control groups of hearing Nicaraguans who had never been to school and deaf users of American Sign Language (which does use grammar and number words) to make sure the results were not just due to illiteracy or deafness.
  • When asked to recount the vignettes to a friend who knew their hand signals, the homesigners used their fingers to indicate the number of frogs. But when the numbers got higher than three or four, the signers’ accuracy suffered.
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  • Oddly, the homesigners did use their fingers to keep track of objects, the way children use their fingers to count. Spaepen thinks the signers use each individual finger to represent a unique object — the index finger is the red fish, the middle finger is the blue fish — and not the abstract concept of the number of fish. “They can’t represent something like exactly seven,” Spaepen said. “What they have is a representation of one-one-one-one-one-one-one.”
  • Ryan Catalani on 09 Feb 11
     
    "Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."
Lara Cowell

Deaf Children Use Hands To Invent Own Way Of Communicating - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...090215151441.htm

deaf sign language gesture homesign

shared by Lara Cowell on 14 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 14 Oct 16
     
    Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language.
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