Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new language in Nicaragua. The catch

is that it is not a spoken language but, rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children.

The Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) emerged in the late 1970s, at a new school for deaf children. Initially the children were instructed by teachers who could hear. No one taught them how to sign; they simply worked it out for themselves. By conducting experiments on people who attended the school at various points in its history, Dr. Senghas has shown how NSL has become more sophisticated over time. For example, concepts that an older signer uses a single sign for, such as rolling and falling, have been unpacked into separate signs by youngsters.

Early users, too, did not develop a way of distinguishing left from right. Dr. Senghas showed this by asking signers of different ages to converse about a set of photographs that each could see. One signer had to pick a photograph and describe it. The other had to guess which photograph was being described.

When all the photographs contained the same elements, merely arranged differently, older people, who had learned the early form. of the language, could neither signal which photo they meant, nor understand the signals of their younger partners. Nor could their younger partners teach them the signs that indicate left and right. The older people clearly understood the concept of left and right, they just could not converse about it a result that bears on the vexing question of how much language merely reflects the way the brain thinks about the world, and how much it actually shapes such thinking.

For a sign language to emerge spontaneously, though, deaf children must have some inherent tendency to tie gestures to meaning. Spoken language, of course, is frequently accompanied by gestures. But, as a young researcher, Dr. Goldin-Meadow suspected that deaf children use gestures differently from those who can hear. In a 30-year-long project carried out on deaf children in America and Taiwan, whose parents can hear normally, she has shown that this is true.

Even deaf children who have no deaf acquaintances use signs as words. The order the signs come in is important. It is also different from the order of words in either English or Chinese. But it is the same, for a given set of signs and meanings, in both America and Taiwan.

Curiously enough, the signs produced by children in Spain and Turkey, whom Dr. Goldin-Meadow is also studying, while similar to each other, differ from those that American and Taiwanese children produce. Dr. Goldin-Meadow is not certain why that is. However, the key commonality is that their spontaneously created languages resemble fully-formed languages.

The Nicaragua Sign Language is__________.

A．a non-verbal language created by deaf children.

B．an artificial language used by people in Nicaragua.

C．a language invented by teachers who teach the deaf.

D．a language described and modified by deliberate linguists