ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-reported expressibility predicts communicative success: Open dataset, validation, and simulation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Modeling Individual Differences in Children's Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Amount of Learning and Signal Stability Modulate Emergence of Structure and Iconicity in Novel Signaling Systems.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Multicomponent and multisensory communicative acts in orang-utans may serve different functions.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Progressive Reduction of Iconic Gestures Contributes to School-Aged Children's Increased Word Production.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Crossing the Rubicon: Behaviorism, Language, and Evolutionary Continuity.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Innovation and enculturation in child communication: a cross-sectional study.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Parents spontaneously scaffold the formation of conversational pacts with their children.Child developmentArticle
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How the world's 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community, offering insights into the dynamics of language evolution. However, documenting the emergence of these languages has mostly consisted of studying the end product; the process by which ad hoc signs are transformed into a structured communication system has not been directly observed. Here we show how young children create new communication systems that exhibit core features of natural languages in less than 30 min. In a controlled setting, we blocked the possibility of using spoken language. In order to communicate novel messages, including abstract concepts, dyads of children spontaneously created novel gestural signs. Over usage, these signs became increasingly arbitrary and conventionalized. When confronted with the need to communicate more complex meanings, children began to grammatically structure their gestures. Together with previous work, these results suggest that children have the basic skills necessary, not only to acquire a natural language, but also to spontaneously create a new one. The speed with which children create these structured systems has profound implications for theorizing about language evolution, a process which is generally thought to span across many generations, if not millennia.
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