JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today?

ROBERT: Words.

JAD: The power of words, of language. Okay, so Nicaragua, 1970s. That's where our next story starts. Are you with me?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So imagine you're a kid that's deaf in Nicaragua at this time.

ROBERT: Born deaf, or ...?

JAD: Born deaf.

ROBERT: Born deaf. Okay.

JAD: You've always been deaf, and you're the only one in your family that's deaf. So you're in this situation where everybody's talking, their mouths are moving. You can't hear it, and you don't know sign language because no one's taught you.

ROBERT: There was no deaf school in Nicaragua then?

JAD: Nothing.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: No deaf education of any kind. So if you were this kid, all you've really got are a couple of gestures, really crude gestures you've worked out to talk to your family and friends, but beyond that you're cut off. Like Ildefonso, the guy we met at the beginning of the show. Except in Nicaragua in the '70s, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of these Ildefonsos.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yeah. But then everything changes.

ANN SENGHAS: In the late '70s, Hope Somoza, who was the wife of the then dictator, established a new school for special education. I think she had someone in her family who had a disability—not deafness.

JAD: But the school would include deaf people, and that, says psychology professor Ann Senghas, was a first. Because now instead of deaf kids scattered about, they were together in the same room.

ANN SENGHAS: There were 50 deaf kids in that first entering class.

JAD: Preschool to sixth grade.

ANN SENGHAS: In the late '70s.

JAD: And for most of them, this was the first time they'd ever met another deaf person.

ANN SENGHAS: Before, the world was going on around them and everyone was all talking and they were cut off from that. And suddenly for the first time, they were all there and they were what was happening, and they were what there was to talk about.

JAD: But they didn't have a way of talking. These were 50 different kids who'd never learned a language and had 50 different sets of, like, rudimentary gestures that they used.

ROBERT: Whoa, that must have been ...

JAD: Yeah, like, 50 people with 50 different ways to try and ...

ROBERT: Ask for breakfast.

JAD: Or say they want to go outside. I mean, nothing was shared.

ANN SENGHAS: It's not like the teachers were using sign in the classroom. Everything in the classroom was Spanish.

JAD: Which none of them knew.

ANN SENGHAS: Copying it into their notebooks. A lot of it was going right over their heads.

JAD: So at the beginning, things were completely confusing.

ANN SENGHAS: But they're riding on the bus for an hour every day, and they're playing out at recess for an hour every day, and they're getting together at the park.

JAD: And no one knows how it happened. Like, maybe one of the kids who was ...

ANN SENGHAS: Very charismatic.

JAD: He invented a sign for, say, ball. Then told it to another kid who was ...

ANN SENGHAS: Very, you know, socially active.

JAD: And that second kid then spread the sign. However it worked, over time the signs that these 50 kids used ...

ANN SENGHAS: Started to converge into a common system.

JAD: And when you step back from it all, what that means ...

ANN SENGHAS: They created a language. They—they didn't just take it from somewhere else. They couldn't take it from somewhere else. They created their own.

JAD: But how unusual is that?

ANN SENGHAS: Like, this has happened with languages all over the world, but not while people were watching.

JAD: And so you're saying this is the first time we've been able to watch a language being born?

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: Wow!

JAD: And for the last 20 years that is what Ann has been doing, she's been going to Nicaragua to that school and watching.

ANN SENGHAS: So—oh you wanted to describe the—I may have gotten recording of this, but when you arrive at the school the buses come around. The kids are all screaming and leaning out the windows and signing to each other. And the kids pile out and they line up in rows on the basketball court that's in the center of the schoolyard. And they all sing the national hymn. And the deaf kids all sign the national hymn, and they all have one hand over their heart and sign with the other hand while the hearing kids sing it.

JAD: Ann visited the school for the first time in 1990, about 10 years after it was formed. She'd been working at the time with a linguist ...

ANN SENGHAS: Named Judy Kegel.

JAD: ... studying basic linguist type stuff.

ANN SENGHAS: Right. Trying to figure how the verbs work, and whether they have agreement with their grammatical objects.

JAD: And along the way, her and a collaborator Jennie Pyers stumbled into something really surprising about the power of certain words. So to set it up: when she got there the first time in—to Nicaragua, those original 50 kids who'd invented this thing had grown up already, and there were these younger generations of kids coming in behind them, growing up with the language, using it, inventing new signs. And at a certain point, she got curious to just compare the original signers, the older kids, to the younger kids.

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: In terms of how they signed.

ANN SENGHAS: So we show everyone this old one-minute cartoon about this guy who's trying to fly. He sees a bird flying, and he puts all these feathers on his body and climbs up to the top of a mountain. Flaps his arms and jumps and crashes on the ground.

JAD: So she showed deaf kids of different generations this cartoon and asked them pretty simply to describe ...

ANN SENGHAS: What they saw.

JAD: Just describe it in sign.

ANN SENGHAS: Describe the whole story.

JAD: The differences were striking.

ANN SENGHAS: So ...

JAD: First of all ...

ANN SENGHAS: So I'll just show you an example of each.

JAD: So you're opening up a movie here.

ANN SENGHAS: So this is a first cohort sign we're talking about.

JAD: She got out her laptop and showed me some video, first of this woman in her 40s with dark hair and a colorful t-shirt. She was one of the original signers. And when you see older signers like her describe this guy who's trying to fly, it's really spastic. It's almost like they become the cartoon. And she's flapping her hands ...

ANN SENGHAS: So ...

JAD: ... moving all around.

ANN SENGHAS: A lot of full body movements. She's talking about someone who's moving in a crazy way, she's gonna be moving in a crazy way. And ...

JAD: Then she showed me a young kid who was about eight with a backwards cap.

ANN SENGHAS: So here's Sylvester, and now he talks about the manner.

JAD: When he described the man jumping and then falling, it was all in the wrist.

ANN SENGHAS: All the movement is now in the hand, and it's very ...

JAD: Stylish.

ANN SENGHAS: [laughs] You know, they're trimming these signs down.

JAD: But more to the point, there was one thing she noticed that was really unexpected, it had nothing to do with movement.

ANN SENGHAS: Couldn't help noticing that they—the people, different people in the community talked about different things in this story. The older signers tended to describe all the events in this story.

JAD: And only the events.

ANN SENGHAS: And the younger kids ...

JAD: They would talk about the guy's feelings.

ANN SENGHAS: That this guy was trying to fly, wanted to fly but failed.

JAD: The kids, she says, just seem to be better at ...

ANN SENGHAS: Thinking about ...

JAD: Thinking.

ANN SENGHAS: ... thinking.

JAD: Like other people's thinking. So Ann and Jennie decided let's take all the different generations of deaf kids ...

ANN SENGHAS: 40 year olds, 30 year olds, 20 year olds, 10 year olds ...

JAD: ... let me test them on how well they can think about thinking. So what they did was they showed everybody a comic strip—different from before. This one was about two brothers.

ANN SENGHAS: There's a big brother who's playing with a train, and then the little brother is, like, wanting to play with the train. And the big brother's playing with the train. And then the big brother puts it under the bed and goes into the kitchen to eat a sandwich.

JAD: And maybe before he goes he looks at the little brother and says, "Hey! Don't touch my train. Don't touch it!"

ANN SENGHAS: And then little brother, while the big brother's out of the room, takes the train out and hides it in the toy box. And then the big brother comes back, and the question is where's the big brother gonna go to find his train? Is he gonna look under the bed or is he gonna look in the toy box?

ROBERT: Well, he's gonna look under the bed.

JAD: Yep.

ROBERT: Because as far as he knows that's where he left it.

JAD: Yeah.

ANN SENGHAS: He didn't see it move.

JAD: And if you ask kids over the age of five, most of them would say he's gonna look under the bed because that's where he left it and he doesn't know that it's been moved to the toy box. But here's the thing: when she asked the older signers ...

ANN SENGHAS: They would say, "Oh, he'll look in the toy box."

JAD: Really?

ANN SENGHAS: They would pick the wrong one. These are 35 year olds.

JAD: 35 year olds would get this wrong?

ANN SENGHAS: They would fail this test, yeah.

JAD: Seven out of eight, she says.

ANN SENGHAS: And then all of the younger signers that we worked with passed.

JAD: At this point she's just confused. Like, why would this be? Why can't the older people pass this simple test that involves thinking about someone else's thinking? What's going on here? And then it occurred to her it might have something to do with certain words, because the older signers they don't really have that many words for the concept of ...

ANN SENGHAS: Thinking.

JAD: I mean, they have mainly just one sign.

JAD: Pointing at your forehead?

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: Basically you just point at your forehead with your index finger. But by the time you get to the younger kids, they've got tons of words for thinking.

ANN SENGHAS: Things like, "I know something and I know that you don't know it."

JAD: "I know something and I know you do know it. They've got a sign for "understand," "believe."

ANN SENGHAS: Believe, remember, forget.

JAD: How many roughly were there?

ANN SENGHAS: 10 or 12.

JAD: Wow! So from 30 years we go from just a couple to ...

ANN SENGHAS: Well, we went from knowing and not knowing. Right.

JAD: To 12?

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: And somehow that makes all the difference, she says. The more of these "think words" you've got the more you can think.

JAD: Am I right to say that? You're tiptoeing toward that.

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: But maybe you don't want to go there all the way?

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah, I'm trying to think that—I guess I don't think it's so simple that you could just go in and say, "Hey, I'm gonna teach you 10 signs today and now suddenly you're gonna have better cognitive capacity."

JAD: But you are saying though that the verb, "think" ...

ANN SENGHAS: Uh-huh.

JAD: ... is somehow implicated in my ability to think about your thinking.

ANN SENGHAS: Right. Thinking about thinking. Understanding how other people understand. That's something that having language makes you better at.

JAD: There are certain words, she says, that don't just give you a name for something, somehow they give you access to a concept that would otherwise be really hard to get or even talk about. It's really hard to talk about thoughts without the word "thoughts." Or what is time without the word "time?" It's a really freaking hard concept. These words are like bridges. Somehow they get you to some new mental place that otherwise you'd be cut off from.

JAD: But that's sad though. I mean, these young kids have something that the people who actually invented the language don't.

ANN SENGHAS: But we went back two years later, tested the same people. And then suddenly some of them were performing a lot better than they had the two years before on the same kinds of tasks.

JAD: You mean the older signers?

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah.

JAD: They were passing suddenly?

ANN SENGHAS: Some of them were passing, yeah.

JAD: What happened?

ANN SENGHAS: What happened in the past two years?

JAD: Yeah!

ANN SENGHAS: Those younger kids grew up and started hanging out at the deaf association.

JAD: Wait, what?

ANN SENGHAS: [laughs] So what had happened in the meantime ...

JAD: So here's the strange twist to the whole thing: the deaf association is this place where the older signers would hang out.

ANN SENGHAS: Yeah, it's a social club.

JAD: So they'd play chess, do whatever. Well, at a certain point these youngsters start showing up, you know, because they've graduated and they want to hang out at the deaf association too. But they bring with them all of their new ...

ANN SENGHAS: Mental verbs.

JAD: You know, all these words for thinking. They start using it with the older kids. The older kids pick it up. Suddenly these older kids are now passing the test!

ANN SENGHAS: So there was learning that took place in adulthood that actually gives them new insight into other people's thinking and motivation, and now they can pass these tasks.

JAD: That's super interesting!

ANN SENGHAS: So that's the story. It's really cool!

JAD: Ann Senghas is an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York.

ROBERT: The thing of course you wonder is once you've gotten these—this new facility in you—like, there's a lot of literature about this. My Fair Lady is about this.

JAD: My Fair Lady is about this?

ROBERT: Yeah, it's about a woman who learns proper English, and she can no longer be a flower girl in Covent Garden. She's now a lady.

JAD: Yeah, I guess it is kind of like this.

ROBERT: You wonder—like, remember that our program began with the story of Ildefonso?

JAD: Right, which we heard from Susan Schaller. Ildefonso, who was the guy who for 27 years had no language at all.

ROBERT: So you kind of wonder ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: I mean, I can tell you ...

ROBERT: ... like, what happened to Ildefonso once he got language.

JAD: Right. And after that first breakthrough where Ildefonso realized things have names, Susan ended up leaving for a few years.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Let's see, it was about four years, I think. Four or five.

JAD: But then she decided to write a book about him.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And so I went and found him again. And he had language, and I could ask him all kinds of questions.

JAD: Were you able then to sit down with him and ask him about his life and really get the—sort of his biography?

SUSAN SCHALLER: Somewhat, somewhat. One area that everyone wants to know about is what it was like to be languageless. You know, what was going on in his head.

JAD: Yeah.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And I asked and I asked and I asked. And he starts telling me that was the dark time in his life. Learning language is like the lights went on. And I tell him well, we know about language and we want to know what it's like not to have language and he doesn't want to talk about it.

ROBERT: But there was a day, she says, when she was writing the book and she met Ildefonso in a restaurant. And there he was sitting with his brother Mario, who she'd never met before. And she quickly learned that Mario also was deaf.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And languageless.

JAD: Really?

SUSAN SCHALLER: So I was shocked and because I was so amazed going I can't believe you have a languageless brother, that's when Ildefonso said, "Well, let—let me introduce you to some of my friends."

ROBERT: So they get in the car and they drive for a while.

SUSAN SCHALLER: We stop at this apartment. We walk into this small little room, and there were these six Mexican men doing this mime routine.

JAD: Wait, all of these guys were like Ildefonso used to be?

SUSAN SCHALLER: They had no language.

JAD: Wow!

SUSAN SCHALLER: They were all born deaf and they didn't know they were deaf.

JAD: And what—what were they doing?

SUSAN SCHALLER: One man would stand up and he would start miming. He would just start acting out a bull fight. So he'd be the bull and he'd be charging, and then he'd be the matador, and then he'd be somebody in the crowd watching. And then he would add a detail.

ROBERT: For example ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: A hat.

ROBERT: And then they'd swap, so then another guy would get up to take over the story.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Then they'd start miming.

ROBERT: They'd reenact the matador.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Describe the hat.

ROBERT: But now the second storyteller would add a new detail.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Like another person with a pair of glasses or something.

ROBERT: So each one would stand up, take the bullfight, the same bullfight to a different point and add a detail?

SUSAN SCHALLER: [laughs] Exactly, exactly.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

SUSAN SCHALLER: In other words, it would take them maybe 45 minutes to say, "Do you remember the time when we were at the bullfight and this woman did such and such?"

JAD: Hmm. Wow!

SUSAN SCHALLER: It was like drawing a picture.

ROBERT: Let me ask you a pull-it-all-together question. I was about to think that what a language is is a great connector, but this last story makes me wonder. These are five men really sharing and connecting on details, so is the difference that language makes just efficiency, or does it affect your heart or your whole way of—I can't tell. I'm not sure anymore.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Well, I'll give you Ildefonso's answer, which when I saw him a couple years later after this incident, I asked him about his friends and he said he couldn't talk to them anymore. He—he wasn't willing to go through that tedious effort of all the miming anymore. But the interesting thing that he said was he can't even think that way anymore. He said he can't think the way he used to think, and when I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. "I don't know, I don't remember. I think differently now."

JAD: Susan Schaller is author of the book, A Man Without Words. Go to Radiolab.org for more info, and if you go there or if you're subscribed to our podcast you'll get this automatically, but there's a beautiful short film directed by two really talented guys Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante that is all about words.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message seven.]

[ANN SENGHAS: Hi. This is Ann Senghas, just back from Nicaragua just in time to read in the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Pat Walters. Our staff includes Ellen Horne ...]

[JAMES SHAPIRO: ... Soren Wheeler ...]

[CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: ... Brenna Farrell ...]

[ANN SENGHAS: ... Lulu Miller ...]

[JAMES SHAPIRO: ... Tim Howard ...]

[CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: ... and Lynn Levy.]

[ANN SENGHAS: With help from Sharon Shattuck, Rehman ...]

[SUSAN SCHALLER: ... Tungekar, Nicole Kouri ...]

[JAMES SHAPIRO: ... and Sam Roudman. Special thanks to Posey Gruener.]

[SUSAN SCHALLER: Bye bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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