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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks, all, for some fascinating links. Yes, Werner, I completely share your reservations about the positive and negative inferences one can legitimately draw from this kind of evidence. An outstanding feature of speech, for me, is the way the body utilises components that clearly had another primary function initially. This tends to lead me towards those who argue that language is borne of deep-seated pattern formation in the brain - that it is only one output of a deeper function. I shall tote off Schoenemann's article to read tonight!
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A study I read about several years ago from McGill University in Montreal studied the brain activity of two groups of bilingual test subjects. One group learned French pretty much at the same time as they did English while the second group acquired French later.
The subjects' brain activity was measured when they were asked to perform in French. The patterns for each group were very different and for the group that learned French later there was a short, though measurable, lag time. The lag time was noted even in those subjects that would have been considered completely fluent with no accent.
Rouspeteur
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What conclusion do you draw, Rouspeteur? [pause] C'est a dit, qu'est-ce que tu crois? some forms of French come more naturally than others...
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Carpal Tunnel
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All this information all over sudden for this poor Fool trying to unsuccessfully understand the universe!
Follow wsieber's link and look at the response linked to at the bottom of the page. The link *that correspondent gives is to a 38 page .pdf document that I have printed out and will read sometime. It should also be noted that the gentleman in wsieber's link is responding to a newspaper article; it won't be the first time the press has converted "a gene linked to..." into "a gene for...".
Still, I love all this new information for me to gobble up and attempt to digest. I am already churning stuff around in my brain and coming up with more questions. Particularly note that the gene discovered in humans is also present in mice.
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old hand
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old hand
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The subjects' brain activity was measured when they were asked to perform in French. The patterns for each group were very different and for the group that learned French later there was a short, though measurable, lag time. The lag time was noted even in those subjects that would have been considered completely fluent with no accentI've often wondered about this. I first started learning Italian when I was 3 or 4, and I also spent kindergarten in French Immersion. Then to further confuse me linguistically, I lived in Sardinia for two years. Although you couldn't really call me fluent in French any more, what I do say comes naturally, there is no stopping to translate words before saying them. And I wouldn't have any trouble communicating in Quebec if I had to. I've always thought I had somehow managed to internalize all the French that my teachers were saying to me, even though I didn't understand it at the time. I did go back into immersion for three years in junior high and I found the language came quite naturally; I never had much trouble picking up vocabulary. In contrast, I have been trying to learn Turkish, and it is a STRUGGLE. It has absolutely no connection to Latin, as French and Italian do. I was shocked at how different my Turkish experience has been!
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>> What conclusion do you draw, Rouspeteur?
I think you can teach an old dog new tricks, he might just do them differently. Seriously though, I think that at a very young age the brain is still quite malleable and new pathways can be set down. My children are learning new words each day and creating new pathways. (They don't know which language they are learning, they just know which sounds mean what.) They will end up speaking without an accent in both languages as a result.
I first entered French immersion in Grade 6 (11-12 years-old) and although competent in the language I will never be mistaken for a native speaker. New pathways can be created but they will never be as efficient as the ones created in infancy. I would liken it to people who are able to learn how to speak again after a stroke.
Rouspeteur
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here's the link to the article in wsieber's site that I think is the one mav toted: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~ptschoen/syntax.emergence.pdfI like his division of "language" into phonetics, semantics, and syntax. According to his definitions, I'd say the so-called speech gene concerns phonetics: production and perception of the actual sounds (or signs) used by language. I, too, have problems with saying there's "a gene for speech". That's way too broad a category for one poor little ol' gene to cover, all by its lonesome! I'm not that up on DNA and all, but I do know there are different parts of our make-up that control, for ex., hearing--the physical capacity to hear things; the way we interpret what we hear (what Prof. Schoenemann calls semantics, re: language); how we decide what we want to communicate; and the physical capacity to make the sounds that we want to make. And I suspect this "speech gene" may have something to do with either the second or fourth of the things that I just mentioned. As was said, communication involves more than verbal language. For ex., in the movie The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger portrays a cybernetic organism that has A.I. (hi mav!) and no emotions. Well, Arnie's acting was a little too good in one scene: when something threatening suddenly appeared, the "emotionless" character's eyes widened. This is an automatic response for humans, though I suppose with determination it could be overcome. We haven't come that far down the evolutionary track: our hairs can still stand up in scary situations, as does, say, a dog's ruff, making it appear bigger and therefore more likely to win a battle. Language and communicating: how could anyone not be interested in it? 
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Carpal Tunnel
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It seems to me that the article took the sociobiological approach - "I believe this to be true, so, ipso facto, it is true."
I think those who have said that this particular gene may be one of several (or more) which, missing or mutated, will impede the speech faculty are probably bang-on. Good sense, folks!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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