Words from the Void

Title: Words from the Void
Date: July 7 1998
Source: Josie Glausiusz
Webpage:
http://www.discover.com/science _news/mindscience.html

This article reveals that children are very quick at picking up language. Psychologist Susan Goldin-Measow did an experiment. She videotaped eight deaf children, half in the US and half in Taiwan, playing with their mothers. All of the children were profoundly deaf. Instead of learning to lip-read they used a complex series of gestures to express their needs. The sequences were very complex. Golden says that language originated with the children and not with the parents. She discovered identical signing patterns among the deaf American and Taiwanese children. She found more in common between the children of both countries than the children...