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"The Forbidden Experiment"
Aug. 18th, 2007 07:13 pmSome Kind of Sign
By LEAH HAGER COHEN, The New York Times, August 19, 2007
TALKING HANDS: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.
By Margalit Fox. (Illustrated. 354 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.)
In the seventh century B.C., the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus conducted an unusual experiment: he plucked a couple of infants from their mothers and turned them over to a shepherd, to be raised in seclusion and in the absence of any spoken word. The idea was that whatever sounds the babies spontaneously emitted would reveal the oldest, the original human language.
This anecdote appears in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, and although its veracity is disputed, it continues to tantalize linguists, among whom it has become known as the Forbidden Experiment — forbidden because its replication would be ethically untenable; tantalizing because of the rich psycholinguistic data such an experiment would surely yield.
The Forbidden Experiment is the specter that haunts “Talking Hands,” the story of a remote Bedouin village where an indigenous sign language has drawn the attention of a team of linguists, who hope it will provide information about our innate capacity for language and our drive to create it. During the past 70 years, this village of 3,500 people has experienced an unusually high incidence of deafness (about one in 25, 40 times that of the general population). As a result of these numbers, and the fact that until recently the villagers had not been exposed to established signed languages, the one that sprang up there and is now used by both deaf and hearing people holds special value for researchers.
( Read More )
By LEAH HAGER COHEN, The New York Times, August 19, 2007
TALKING HANDS: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.
By Margalit Fox. (Illustrated. 354 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.)
In the seventh century B.C., the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus conducted an unusual experiment: he plucked a couple of infants from their mothers and turned them over to a shepherd, to be raised in seclusion and in the absence of any spoken word. The idea was that whatever sounds the babies spontaneously emitted would reveal the oldest, the original human language.
This anecdote appears in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, and although its veracity is disputed, it continues to tantalize linguists, among whom it has become known as the Forbidden Experiment — forbidden because its replication would be ethically untenable; tantalizing because of the rich psycholinguistic data such an experiment would surely yield.
The Forbidden Experiment is the specter that haunts “Talking Hands,” the story of a remote Bedouin village where an indigenous sign language has drawn the attention of a team of linguists, who hope it will provide information about our innate capacity for language and our drive to create it. During the past 70 years, this village of 3,500 people has experienced an unusually high incidence of deafness (about one in 25, 40 times that of the general population). As a result of these numbers, and the fact that until recently the villagers had not been exposed to established signed languages, the one that sprang up there and is now used by both deaf and hearing people holds special value for researchers.
( Read More )
