A Linguistic Big Bang: Humans Have a Language Instinct

LINGUIST101-SEC01 People & Their Language
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LINGUIST101-SEC01 People & Their Language
Language is not wholly learned but is the interaction between an innate language instinct in humans and social stimuli. The human language instinct allows children to generate utterances previously absent in their input. Children can develop rudimentary communication systems even though they have been exposed to conventional language. The natural ability to learn a language is especially operative in the early years of childhood and the Nicaraguan Sign Language is proof that language acquisition is rooted in an innate language instinct. This essay will use the evidence in the article “A Linguistic Big Bang” by Lawrence Osborne to construct arguments that support the hypothesis that humans have a language instinct.
The article by Osborne narrates the origins and structure of the complex sign system being developed by deaf children in two Managua schools in Nicaragua. After the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the then recently installed Nicaraguan administration embarked on a countrywide literacy campaign that saw hundreds of deaf students join two Managua schools (Osborne, 1999). These learners were not familiar with the over 200 existing sign languages used by other deaf children but started developing a sign language of their own from scratch. The deaf children had no language structures to build on and started with the basic gestural signs used within their own families. Moreover, the teachers at the school had failed to implement a practical teaching pedagogy and the children were linguistically detached from their instructors. However, these challenges did not deter the children from creating a linguistic structure of their own and communicating well among themselves.
The first evidence fr...