system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:If a group of, say, children were raised alone in total silence, with no external exposure to language, would the children develop a language between them?

I know this is a weird question, but i've been thinking a lot about language acquisition.

So, hypothetically, assuming that there are 10 children on a deserted island, somehow receiving food and care without any external language exposure. Assume that developmentally, they are all at the exact same age.

As they age, will they develop a language unique to them?



ETA: typo in title. Meant to say "Say, 10 children."
gpt
We don't know. And we *won't* know, because the experiment is unethical to perform. In fact, if you search for "Forbidden Experiment" on Wikipedia, you are redirected to the page titled "Language Deprivation Experiments." So this is not just *a* forbidden experiment, this is The Forbidden Experiment.

We can't really know without experimental evidence. The current theories about brain development suggest that language plays an important part. But this theory is basically non-falsifiable, because we refuse to observe the development of a human brain in the absence of language. Without evidence, we cannot call these theories scientific in any meaningful sense. They are merely hypotheses.

We also don't know *how much* or *in what way* the development of the brain is guided by language. There is *some* evidence about how learning different languages effects thinking later in life, but it's incredibly difficult to separate the effects of language from the effects of culture. We have plausibly concrete data on the effects of learning one language vs more than one, but we cannot generalize that to learning less than one.