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A key question in developmental psychology and linguistics is whether language merely expresses pre-existing concepts or provides new cognitive tools. De Villiers and colleagues suggest that abstract transitive relationships can only be reliably encoded via language, supporting this claim with evidence that infants and adults struggle with transitive role differentiation without language. This study examines adult Nicaraguan homesigners, an ideal case study because they lack conventional language but create personal communication systems. Homesigners and English-speaking five-year-olds were tested in an imitation task, revealing that both groups could accurately encode transitive relationships, with no significant differences between groups or event types. In the critical two-participant condition, performance was well above chance for both groups. These results suggest that the ability to encode and generalize transitive relationships exists independently of conventional language.