It is assumed that in order to acquire a language, children must be exposed to a language during the critical period, which generally lasts until puberty. Here, we report on Cena, an emergent sign language that has developed among a small group of deaf people in an isolated town in the state of Piauí, Brazil. Starting three generations ago, it has…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…