Washington - Certain basic characteristics of grammar present in all languages are built into the workings of the human brain, US researchers have claimed.
By studying the gesture communication of deaf children who where never taught a conventional sign, spoken or written language, researchers at the University of Rochester found examples for some of the same rules of grammar every other language uses.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, established that the children used the grammatical idea of a "subject".
The notion of subject is an abstract concept since it does not only describe tangible objects but also symbolic ideas such as liberty, the researchers said.
"We're starting to see that the grammatical concept of 'subject' is part of the bedrock on which languages form," said lead researcher Elissa Newport.
For eight years, Newport and her team studied three deaf Nicaraguan boys who had no exposure to a formal sign language and who had little or no education. They showed the children short videos which they then renarrated using their own language. - Sapa-dpa