Further evidences for modularity

THE AUTONOMY OF LANGUAGE

GENETIC EVIDENCE• Gopnik and Crago (1991) and Gopnik (1992)

• Study of a family in which, of 30 members across three generations, 16 suffered from the inability to acquire morpho- syntactic rules

• E. g. She remembered when she hurts herself the other day.

He did it then he fall.

• Suggest that this reflects a genetic based syntactic ability, which some linguists would refer to as Universal Grammar

• “There is now empirical evidence that shows that a single dominant gene is associated with the ability to construct symbolic rules in the grammar”

SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT• Cases of children (without brain lesions) who have difficulties in

acquiring language or are much slower than the average child

• Suffering from Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

• Only linguistic ability is affected, and only specific aspects of grammar are impaired

• Turner’s syndrome

• Williams syndrome

• Developmental Dyslexia

• Identical twins more frequently suffer from SLI than fraternal twins

HEMIPLEGICS• Congenital hemiplegia

• Acquired hemiplegia

• Children with acquired unilateral lesions of the brain and who retain both hemispheres (one normal and one diseased)- called hemiplegic- studied by Dennis and Whitaker in 1976

• Left damaged hemispheres- showed deficiency in language acquisition and performance with thee greatest impairments in their syntactic ability

HEMIDECORTICATES• those with left hemispheres removed either within the first year

of life or later in childhood

• Dennis and her colleagues (1980) found that the IQ. and cognitive skills were equivalent in both left and right hemidecorticates

• but in visual-spatial function, the left-hemidecorticates outperform the right, and in language, the right-hemidecorticates outstrip the left

• both hemispheres appear to be equivalent in the ability to acquire the use of the sense and referential structure of common words, but the right hemisphere again shows syntactic deficits

IDIOT SAVANTS• Recently simply called ‘Savants’

• Case for an innate language faculty distinct from general intelligence

• Some of the most famous savants are human calculators who can perform complex arithmetic processes at phenomenal speed

• Linguistically handicapped

LAURA• Yamada (1990) reports- Non- verbal IQ of 41- 44

• Lacking all number concepts including basic counting principles

• Drawing at a pre- school level

• Processing an auditory memory span limited to three units

• At the age of 16- produced syntactically complex sentences like ,’She does paintings, this really good friend of the kids who I went to school with last year and really loved.’

• One of many examples of children who display well-developed phonological, morphological and syntactic linguistic abilities

• Seemingly less developed lexical, semantic, or referential aspects of language

• Deficits in non- linguistic cognitive development

CHATTERBOX SYNDROME• Children with internal hydrocephaly

• Cromer (1991) refers as Chatterbox syndrome

• Talk excessively but speech lacks content

• Cromer’s conclusions: “language acquisition proceeds on a different course, basically independent of general cognitive development.”

• Suggests: “such cases seem to show that general cognitive mechanisms are neither necessary nor sufficient for the growth of language.”

CHRISTOPHER• Smith and Tsimpli (1995)

• Christopher- 34- institutionalized because he is unable to take care of himself

• Finds tasks of buttoning a shirt, cutting finger- nails or vacuuming the carpet too difficult

• When given written texts in some 15 or 16 languages, translates them immediately into English

• Conversation laconic, repetitive and filled with parts that appear to have been memorized from textbooks

• Conclude: “linguistic competence in his first language is as rich and as sophisticated as that of any native speaker… linguistic knowledge integrated into his general cognitive function sufficiently… clear that some linguistic phenomena lie outside his capabilities [and] that these are not due to a deficit in his grammar… arise from processing difficulties which involve the interaction of his modular, linguistic faculty with central system operation.”

SIGN LANGUAGE• By Bellugi et al. 1988

• Languages of the deaf have all the crucial properties common to all spoken languages, including highly abstract, underlying grammatical and formal principles

• Patients show marked sign language deficits, they can correctly process non- language visual- spatial relationships

• Crucial point- left hemisphere specialization in language acquisition is not due to its capacity for fine auditory analysis, but for language analysis