Ann Senghas

Cognitive scientist and linguist whose 1995 MIT doctoral dissertation, "Children's Contribution to the Birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language," is the founding scholarly document on the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) — the clearest documented natural experiment on a human language arising from zero linguistic input. She matters to this vault as the load-bearing Tier-1 source for the vault's entire NSL cluster: her own fieldwork, read directly rather than through secondary retellings, both grounds the community's founding dates and mechanism and corrects the popular "1977" date her own field's encyclopedic tellings compress toward.

References

• claim-nsl-emerged-in-managua-schools-after-failed-oral-spanish-curriculum
• claim-nsl-1977-date-refers-to-nonsigning-precursor-not-1980-founding-cohort
• claim-nsl-signing-community-grew-to-over-500-members-by-mid-1990s
• claim-nicaraguan-sign-language-emerged-from-zero-language-exposure
• claim-nsl-second-cohort-child-learners-systematized-grammar-beyond-founders