Voices en Español

Is it hard for you to understand Spanish grammar? Don’t worry, it turns out that our brains are designed to help us get it. A team of investigators from the University of Rochester has learned that the human brain has the infrastructure of grammar hardwired into it.

The researchers spent 8 years studying three young men from Nicaragua who were born deaf. The young men didn’t know any Spanish nor had they been taught conventional sign language and yet they had created a new language that they used amongst themselves.

Elissa Newport, one of the researchers, says that there are some universal and fundamental characteristics present in all languages, even languages that aren’t spoken. Prof. Newport says that the three young men had developed a language that followed the same rules as spoken languages. For example, their sentences included the grammatical concept of a subject. You can read more about this fascinating research here.