From the record
Real cases, written from the published record. Predict first; the record and its sources come after.
1887 · Tuscumbia, Alabama
W-a-t-e-r
Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing to an illness at 19 months. She had just begun to speak; one of her first words was "wah-wah" for water.
In 1903 she wrote about a day at the pump when she was six: "As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."
What can this memory tell us about how language starts?
What happened. Researchers use the passage carefully. It is testimony from one person, written as an adult, about a child who had had a little language before her illness. It shows how a moment can feel, not why words become ideas. Anne Sullivan's own letters from that week describe the same day more plainly.
Pause to think. Is a vivid memory good evidence? Evidence for what?
1977–1990s · Managua
A language born in a schoolyard
Before the late 1970s, deaf children in Nicaragua mostly grew up apart, each with a few home signs. New schools in Managua brought hundreds together. The teachers taught lip-reading, not a sign language.
On the buses and in the yard the children built a sign language of their own. Each year new, younger children joined and learned it from the older ones.
Who used more grammar, such as placing signs in space to show who did what to whom?
What happened. The younger cohorts used richer spatial grammar than the first one, though the first had been signing longer. The language grew more structured as it passed to new children.
It took a community to start it, and children to add structure the input lacked. Both sides of the debate take something from this case.