Article: “What Happens if a Child Is Never Exposed to Language?”
“Children learn the language(s) that they hear and see around them at a young age, but what happens if a child just never has any linguistic input, spoken or signed? Although a scientific study around this question would undoubtedly be fascinating, it would also be extremely unethical, so much so that the cultural historian Roger Shattuck has called it The Forbidden Experiment…”
“In Nicaragua in the 1980s, many such children were brought together in the country’s first school for the deaf, where especially the younger children took the various home signs of their classmates and stitched them together into a full-fledged sign language, as you can see in the video below: A clip from the PBS documentary Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang. Nicaraguan Sign Language has been cited as evidence that although children require a certain amount of linguistic input at a young age in order to learn language, they’re capable of generalizing from incomplete information to something far richer and more complex—a testament to the magnificent potential of the human brain.”
With this RLE and May 2021 Prescribed Title #6, bias could be interpreted through the ways in which the hearing impaired students are treated. A deeper investigation into the RLE reveals more specific ways that bias had a negative and positive role in the acquisition of knowledge.