The Resilient Properties of Language

In graduate school I started studying Deaf children of hearing parents who the children were so deaf they couldn't acquire spoken language, no cochlear implants at the time. So under those conditions you might think they do nothing or just do something that's very non symbolic. But in fact they started to use their hands to communicate. They gestured. And it's those gestures that I have thought about as the resilient properties of language because it's the kind of properties that children can invent without a language model. In some sense they're telling us what children can bring to language even if they're not exposed to a language. Fascinating. I love that.