Ann Senghas is a psycholinguist and cognitive scientist at Barnard College, Columbia University, best known for her longitudinal study of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). Her research on how successive cohorts of deaf children systematized and elaborated NSL into a fully grammatical language has made her a central figure in debates about language emergence, acquisition, and the poverty of the stimulus. Her empirical work bears directly on philosophical questions about linguistic nativism and the learnability of grammar.
Documented the generational systematization of Nicaraguan Sign Language as a natural language experiment
Demonstrated that child learners, not adult founders, drove grammatical elaboration in NSL — supporting critical-period and nativist hypotheses
Provided empirical evidence bearing on the poverty of the stimulus argument against grammar learnability from primary linguistic data alone
Contributed longitudinal data on spontaneous language creation in a community without a prior sign language model
Advanced understanding of the biological and developmental bases of human language capacity