Sign Language Study

Findings from a new study done at the University of Rochester show that there does not exist a lone area of the human brain "that gives it language capacities above and beyond those of any other animal species." The team working on this consisted of both brain and cognitive scientists at the University and they came to this conclusion by analyzing if different human brain regions are used to decipher sentences with varying types of grammar. The reason for choosing American Sign Language for the study is because of the language's versatility with grammar. English for example relies on word order within a sentence to convey the meaning and relationships between the elements of the sentence. Spanish on the other hand depends on inflections and suffixes (me, te, se) in order to portray subject-object relationships and the order of words in sentences are often interchangeable. American Sign Language has both of these qualities of word order and inflection to show meaning. The signer can use word order or choose to "use physical inflections such as moving hands through space or signing on one side of the body to convey the relationship."

The experiment used native signers and had them watch videos of recorded sentences. Half of the group watched sentences that utilized word order and the other half used inflection. Native signers were hooked up to an MRI to monitor brain activation when processing different types of sentences. The results of the study show that there are"distinct regions of the brain that are used to process the two types of sentences." Our understanding of grammar draws upon different brain regions; for example "a word order sentence draws on parts of the front cortex that give humans the ability to put information into sequences, while an inflectional sentence draws on parts of the temporal lobe that specialize in diving information into its constituent parts." This dispels any belief that humans' language capacities are derived from some special region of the brain that has developed and does only language and nothing else; instead, humans use and adapt the capabilities of our brain that are already present.

Not only does this provide more evidence for the possibilities of how language abilities might have evolved in humans, but it could also be useful for medicine. According to Elissa Newport, this could be valuable in assessing how to best teach language to people with brain damage in specific areas such as a stroke victim. This also provides cognitive empirical evidence of the legitimacy of American Sign Language as a distinct language. As discussed previously in class, there has been debate over whether or not American Sign Language (or sign languages in general) are considered to be distinctive languages that are on par with other languages such as Spanish or English. Activating different brain regions proves that processing and understanding American Sign Language mimics that of understanding a spoken language and the lack of speech does not undermine the language.

here's the article: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3610