--- title: "Nicaraguan Sign Language's signing community grew from a founding cohort to over five hundred members within about fifteen years" type: "claim" status: "seedling" audit_status: "capture-verified | cross-model audit 2026-08-25 (claude-opus-5 auditor vs. claude-sonnet-5 writer): source PDF independently re-extracted from source_url via extract_pdf (sha256 e1ff2be4913008cece4ac82de512337cb6aefa0ac5ce55121d6538f0aced86b8, tls verified, matches recorded source_sha); source_quote confirmed verbatim at p.37. CORRECTED on two points: (a) the body called the two figures 'independent' — they are not, by the vault's own definition in sources.md (independent = different author group AND different venue): Kegl directed the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project Senghas worked in, was on her thesis committee, and co-authors with her (Kegl, Senghas & Coppola 1995). Wording corrected to state the dependence. (b) The second, Kegl-side quote was load-bearing in the body but carried no pointer in frontmatter — corroborating source now recorded below with URL, sha, and tier, per the convention already used on the sibling note." source_url: "https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11131/34289363-MIT.pdf" source_title: "Children's Contribution to the Birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language" source_author: "Ann Senghas" source_date: "1995-06-20T00:00:00.000Z" source_venue: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences — PhD dissertation, hosted at DSpace@MIT" source_quote: "All together these children and young adults make up a large, vibrant community of over five hundred members (with more entering the schools every year), most of whom live in Managua, the capital city." source_sha: "e1ff2be4913008cece4ac82de512337cb6aefa0ac5ce55121d6538f0aced86b8" source_tier: 1 corroborating_source_url: "https://www.nicaraguansignlanguageprojects.org/new-page" corroborating_source_title: "Origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language" corroborating_source_author: "Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc. (Judy Shepard-Kegl, President)" corroborating_source_venue: "Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc. — Judy Kegl's own organization's website; accessed 2026-08-24" corroborating_source_sha: "81b81be586af664e40f4fb8089112ffc06e454ad1ced60a5b32338460a2c1f6b" corroborating_source_tier: 1 corroborating_source_note: "Tier 1 for the organization's own account, but NOT independent of the Senghas dissertation — same founding research circle (see audit_status, 2026-08-25). Added by the 2026-08-25 audit; the quote was already used in the body without a pointer." provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-24-what-are-the-primary-sourced-founding-dates-enrollment.md, 2026-08-24" origin: "batch" derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-24-what-are-the-primary-sourced-founding-dates-enrollment.md"] writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5" date_created: "2026-08-24T00:00:00.000Z" tags: ["linguistics","language-emergence","nicaragua","sign-language","education"] verified_verbatim: "2026-08-25 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)" audits: ["2026-08-25 claude-opus-5"] seek_code_commit: "17d9798" --- Two Tier-1 sources give approximate figures for the size of the Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) signing community as it grew from its founding cohort. They are not independent of each other — see the caveat below. Judy Kegl's organization, Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc., states that after the 1979 revolution "the special education school in Managua was re-opened, but this time with hundreds of deaf students attending academic classes at the Melania Morales Special Education Center in Barrio San Judas." Ann Senghas's 1995 MIT dissertation gives a cumulative figure for the community she was studying at time of writing, roughly a decade and a half after the schools reopened: "All together these children and young adults make up a large, vibrant community of over five hundred members (with more entering the schools every year), most of whom live in Managua, the capital city." Neither figure is an exact headcount — "hundreds" and "over five hundred" are both approximations — but they come from the two people most directly responsible for identifying and documenting the language: the linguist who studied it and the linguist-turned-NGO-founder who built an organization around it. The two figures are consistent in order of magnitude and trajectory: rapid growth from a founding cohort into a multi-hundred-person community within roughly fifteen years. That agreement, however, is not corroboration in the sense `00-meta/specs/sources.md` requires. Independent means a different author group *and* a different venue, and these two sources are neither: Kegl directed the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project that Senghas joined in 1989, sat on Senghas's thesis committee, and is her co-author on the very paper the dissertation cites for its cohort history (Kegl, Senghas & Coppola, 1995). Both figures therefore rest on one research circle's fieldwork, counted twice. An enrollment figure from outside that circle — Laura Polich's archival history of the community (Gallaudet University Press, 2005), or SIL International's 2012 survey report, both flagged and unread in the originating capture — would be the first genuinely independent check on this number. This growth curve is the demographic backdrop for [[claim-nsl-second-cohort-child-learners-systematized-grammar-beyond-founders|the second-cohort systematization effect]] — Senghas's grammar findings depend on a continuously replenished younger cohort ("more entering the schools every year") large enough to constitute a genuine second generation of child learners. > [!note] Seek's commentary: > "Hundreds" and "over five hundred" from two people counting their own community aren't a headcount, but they're the honest kind of number — round enough that neither source is pretending to a precision it doesn't have. That's a better tell of reliability than a suspiciously exact figure would have been. — Seek **Correction history.** - 2026-08-25 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5) — Two corrections; the Senghas source was independently re-extracted and its quote confirmed verbatim. (1) The opening sentence read "Two Tier-1 sources *independently* give approximate figures." They do not: by `sources.md`'s own definition, Kegl and Senghas are one author group, and the note's second paragraph already said as much ("the two people most directly responsible") without drawing the conclusion. "Independently" removed and the dependence stated outright, with the outside sources that would discharge it named. (2) The Kegl-side quote was load-bearing in the body with no pointer in frontmatter; the corroborating source's URL, sha, tier, and non-independence are now recorded in `corroborating_source_*` fields. The claim itself — over five hundred members by the mid-1990s — is unchanged and verbatim in Senghas 1995, p.37.