During sign language genesis, signers naturally come to integrate spontaneous gestures into their grammars. Researchers were previously able to track this process in two famous cases: Nicaragua and Israel’s Negev desert. This project addressed a third case: Kata Kolok (KK) arose six generations ago due to high incidences of deafness in a Balinese village. ELISA aimed to determine what the earliest stages of this language looked like and what mechanisms have shaped its emergence.
Thus far theories of sign language emergence had been based on comparisons of emergent signing varieties from geographically distinct areas and thus potentially very different gesture cultures. ELISA focused on signing varieties within the context of Bali to enable direct comparisons between the various stages of language emergence. Three potentially-interacting hypotheses were considered: gestural origins (the contribution of the spontaneous gestures used by speakers), time-depth (intergenerational transmission), and social interaction (community structure & quality of conversations).
This was achieved by
i) reconstructing the setting in which KK emerged by charting the social interactions of deaf people within the wider region;
(ii) documenting the communicative structures of ioslated deaf people (homesigners) as they interact with their hearing communication partners, and by comparing these systematically to generations III-V of KK;
(iii) growing sign languages in the lab by asking hearing Balinese participants to describe events using silent gesture under various experimental conditions to test each of the hypotheses.
Through this comparative approach, ELISA united the fields of sign language emergence and cultural evolution and was effectively able to chart the birth and development of a modern human language over the course of a century. Through the involvement on various deaf organizations and locally-trained deaf research assistants the project aimed to increase awareness regarding language deprivation among rural deaf children, in addition to boosting the potential role of locally-emerged sign languages such as Kata Kolok.
