In Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, the author, Matt Ridley, refers to Steven Pinker in a chapter on Instinct. He talks about how syntax and general speech rules are instinctive, but vocabulary must be learned. (I'm still confused about how syntax etc. can be instinctual when they're different in all languages, but that's another matter.)

In a chapter on memory he goes on to say that "perhaps even literacy would become innate eventually if illiterate people were at a reproductive disadvantage for long enough." This is mentioned in relation to the fact that the development of dairy farming aided the evolution of lactose tolerance.

What think you?

Syntax and general speech rules are instinctive, but vocabulary must be learned? Aren't syntax and general speech rules also learned? I've heard of the survival instinct, but never of the syntax and general speech rules instinct.
Also, when he says "perhaps even literacy would become innate eventually if illiterate people were at a reproductive disadvantage for long enough.", it sounds like some sort of Darwinesque literary natural selection at work. Bizarre!
Mr. Ridley has a very interesting viewpoint, to say the least.

Dear JazzO: Hard to see how illiterate people could be sufficiently disadvantaged to affect their continuing to reproduce. After all, our ancestors were illiterate for millions of years.

well, dyslexia, and Attention Deficet Disorder. (and the other term, i forget ADHD?) have sprung on the screen, as it were. New modern disorders.. why?

perhaps because, years ago, people like my father, who also has dyslexia, and had trouble in school, were shunted off, as he was, to a trade school.. he wasn't expected to read, so his difficultly reading didn't really matter much.

he became a butcher, got a job with his skill, a skill that required very little reading, and was able to support a family.

An article in today NYTimes points out, a clerical job, nowdays requires a college degree.

In the new technologic marketplace, where information is a commodity, a lack of literacy is a handicap. might that result in illiterate people being unable to support and raise a family? might a man like my father in some future world be unable to keep a job?

possible. but one of Nelson Rockafeller's son's had dyslexia.. but rockefellers money bought him tutors, and readers, and he did fine.

also, since dyslexia is perception problem, smart dyslexics can often learn skills to compensate.. and then can learn to use tools to overcome there handicaps.

my spelling is bad here, (i don't even try aenegma any more) but with a good word processor, i can turn out fine documents.

technology today allows the blind to "read"-- with scanner/readers, the lame, or physically handcapped to to type.. the dyslexics to spell, and edit!

You might know regular contibuters.. but do you ever think of how, they too might be using some of this technology? what evidence do we have? none! all you see are my thoughts, with out seeing my body.. Have i lost a hand or arm to an industrial accident? am i crippled with a childhood disease, or one of old age? how would you know? Unless i told you, all you would see are print outs of my thoughts.. do i speak into a microphone to make words appear? do i have software that scan and reads a page out loud to me? and if i did? would it matter? do really care how i get my ideas into a format you can use? or reformat to meet your needs?

In 1950, doctors encouraged parents of downs syndrom children to abandom them, and consoled them, the children with downs syndrom never lived beyond the age of 2 or 3.

and abandon to an understaffed orphanages, with no antibotics, and little affection, its true, they "failed to thrive" and died young.

but raise in a loving home with caring parents.. down syndrome children live to twenties and thirties..

We value human life too much. Tools that help everyone, often help the handicapped more than we expect.
will illitercy fall away, like lactose intolerance? i don't think so. maybe some, but some cognative learning disorders, like dyslexia will be with us for a long time.

To venture a guess on the "syntax instinct", I'd say he meant for each language. That is, for ex., babies born in English-speaking homes "know" that 'the red book' is correct, and babies born in homes of languages where the adjective follows the noun know that 'the book red' is correct. Infants can understand speech long before they can create it. Even when they're at the "want ba-ba" stage, they know not to say "ba-ba want".

I am not clear on what is meant by innate literacy. That sounds like he meant babies instinctively know that certain shapes on a page stand for certain sounds--and I simply cannot believe that could happen. Even a simple picture story requires a certain level of development, for comprehension. Let's say there are four flash cards: one shows a boy sitting up in bed, yawning; one shows him standing beside the bed; one shows him unmistakably getting dressed, and the last shows him walking outside with his ball. It would take, I believe, an advanced two-, and more likely, a three-year-old, to be able to put those cards in the correct order--up to a certain point, the mental capacity is simply too undeveloped. And for me to think that a 12-month-old who knows his own name when it's spoken could also look at an A and know that it's an A, would be well-nigh impossible.

Mr. Ridley has a very interesting viewpoint, to say the least. - talltales

Hey Talltale, let's advance beyond the "least"and say unabashedly that Mr. Ridley is full of...(Oh heck I can't say it either)...interesting viewpoints.

And how about the chappie - Skinner, I think it is - who reckons that everyone is born with a blank sheet for a mind, on which experience writes the story.
He also believes that until a baby has acquired language knowledge, it is unable to think.

If he is right (not that I am at all certain that he is), or even right about the first bit, then Ridley's theory is impossible

It would take, I believe, an advanced two-, and more likely, a three-year-old, to be able to put those cards in the correct order

Jackie, you are absolutely right. My wife runs a preschool and even she is astonished at how difficult it is to get three year olds to recognise this kind of sequencing. An interesting point is that the powers that be (they who set "desirable learning outcomes") place sequencing under mathematics along with bigger, smaller, in front, behind etc. I guess I understand that now, having had some time to get used to the idea, but it puzzled me at first. Your illustration of babies use of syntax - I hadn’t noticed that, they do get it right don’t they, but it still seems to be learned behaviour, not some kind of genetic inheritance

Looking at the Darwinesque(?) aspect and just thinking aloud, children have a strong innate drive to communicate and we are told that females, because of the left brain, right brain thing, are naturally better at some types of communication (maybe all types?) than are males My personal experience supports that, which leads me to accept that a natural variation exists at a basic level. (Trying hard not to be provocative here and recognising that these are extreme generalisations and sensitive areas!). So if one were to accept that, connected in some way with X and Y chromosomes, there is in-built variation in the natural ability to communicate then, since variation carries with it the potential for improvement, it should be possible for that ability to improve. Improve to the degree suggested by Mr Ridley? I don't believe so. If, as he postulates, literacy became the prime measure of sexual attraction, with consequent impact on successful reproduction for the literate, surely the result would be to strengthen that natural ability to communicate so that improved literacy came along as a spin off. I don't think the ability to communicate better necessarily indicates an increased IQ (look at some of our politicians) which might lead to children regularly learning to read at eighteen months. But even if it did, wouldn’t that still be learned behaviour, not innate?

dxb

Mr. Ridley has a very interesting viewpoint, to say the least. - talltales

Hey Talltale, let's advance beyond the "least"and say unabashedly that Mr. Ridley is full of...(Oh heck I can't say it either)...interesting viewpoints.

I suspect we are misunderstanding Mr. Ridley's viewpoint. If indeed we're understanding it correctly, I'd agree that we are assessing it correctly.

Durn you, milum! Now I have two more books to read: Ridley, and the Pinker he refers to. Where am I going to find all that time?

Steven Pinker, is the author of The Language Instinct, and How the Mind Works, both excellent books, (and available in a quality paperback editions, and affordable.)

Matt Ridley, is the former science editor of The Economist, and author of The Red Queen Theory—(which has a subtitle I forget).

Picker holds, with general agreement from many language experts, that human brains are hardwired for certain things... like seeing in stereo, and syntax
There is some evidence newborns don’t, but quickly learn how to resolve the two slightly different images that come into their eyes; they do so by about age 6 months.

And they begin to smile. Previous to that age, they had many ways of recognizing mother (or primary care giver)—earliest, by heart beat, (pre womb, and post,) smell, sound of mother voice, etc. But once children finally resolve stereo vision and visually recognize the care giver, and start to imitate what they see, i.e., they smile!

Likewise, babies are born with innate sense of syntax and grammar.
Children raised in radically mixed language environments, all learn to speak a common language that incorporates vocabulary from home languages.

These creoles, all tend to follow some basic rules, doesn’t matter were they originate. Where do the rules come from? From the innate sense of syntax and grammar that humans seem to posses. One example is to double a word – hot-hot, instead of having comparative and superlative suffixes ( hot, hotter hottest).
Kids do it all the time Goody-goody!

Do all languages follow the same rules? As languages evolve to the rules change—and I am sure there are host of reasons why—maybe they come in contact with a society that has larger vocabulary or they move to a different environment, and need to expand the language to meet different needs.. (nomadic herders might have different language needs than farmers..)

And there are some basics. You have nouns and modifiers... verbs and modifiers... but word order? That’s up for grabs... so some languages have prepostions, and some have postpositions (only they are not called that, there is an other term... No matter.. It’s a word order question.

But I have serious doubts that literacy will evolve. (i.e., the innate sense that abstract symbols can be combined to have a myrid of meanings)

then Ridley's theory is impossible

A) We're most certainly not born with a blank sheet; if we were we couldn't breathe.

2) I haven't read the Ridley, but I think this is Pinker's theory we're discussing here (or someone else started it {Sapir? Whorf? No, Chomsky. That's who started it.}), Ridley merely discusses it, so let's not be trashing Ridley for our misunderstanding when it's really Pinker and/or Chomsky we should be trashing.

Þ) I have read about this theory in Pinker's The Language Instinct and, while I can't claim to understand it fully, I believe that they are talking about hard-wired syntax and grammar at a deeper level than that we poor mortals normally associate with those concepts.

Side issue:

Lactose intolerance was the norm before we started raising dairy cattle. The idea that anyone over the age of about 3 or 4 would be ingesting any lactose at all, much less the lactose from animals other than man, was unthinkable. It still is in some cultures. The Japanese, e.g., consider the idea of eating cheese somewhat revolting. The present day resurgence of lactose intolerance is, I think, more akin to a general rise of food allergies such as the famous peanut intolerance and is due to other factors. Dr. Bill and I have discussed this in PM and he has offered some interesting ideas on the subject, ideas which, I fear, I do not remember well enough to reiterate here.

") I have read about this theory in Pinker's The Language Instinct and, while I can't claim to understand it fully, I believe that they are talking about hard-wired syntax and grammar at a deeper level than that we poor mortals normally associate with those concepts."


I haven't read Pinker's TLI yet, but plan to. And I think your interpretation is exactly correct. And I think you're also correct that Chomsky had the initial theory about this decades ago.


k

Re: Pinker/Chomsky

I also think that, when we understand the sort of thing they are talking about we would come up with some sort of incredibly insightful comment as , "Well, duh! If that's what they mean by grammar and syntax, it's pretty obvious!"

This is the difference between the casual observer and the serious student. The serious student should question the obvious.

If he [Skinner] is right (not that I am at all certain that he is), or even right about the first bit, then Ridley's theory is impossible

Ridley is basically saying that Skinner is wrong. Each chapter begins with a quote and the one for this chapter is "The tabula of human nature was never rasa." -W.D. Hamilton. Ridley is approaching the subject from an almost purely genetic viewpoint, using the most up-to-date (well, 2000 anyway) information from the Human Genome Project. I don't think he really thinks that literacy will become innate (he doesn't elaborate on the idea), but he's just putting it out there for consideration.

He gives an example of the language instinct:
". . . the most startling evidence for a language instinct comes from a series of natural experiments in which children imposed grammatical rules upon languages that lacked them. In the most famous case, studied by Derek Bickerton, a group of foregin labourers brought together on Hawaii in the nineteenth century developed a pidgin language -- a mixture of words and phrases whereby they could communicate with each other. Like most such pidgins, the language lacked consistent grammatical rules and remained both laboriously complex in the way it had to express things and relatively simple in what it could express. But all that changed when for the first time a generation of children learnt the language in their youth. The pidgin acquired rules of inflection, word order and grammar that made it a far more efficient and effective language -- a creole. in short, as Bickerton concluded, pidgins become creoles only after they are learnt by a generation of children, who bring instinct to bear on their transformation."

The Pinker is very good. His arguments are extremely convincing, and even if you don't agree, his ideas are intriguing.

Dinosaurs lived for millions of years and then died off. The reason was because their environment changed and only animals small (and furry) enough to survive did. The trait of dinosaurs being LARGE etc. worked well for them, but in the end it was their mass that killed them.

Point being, the most distinct traits of a species (ours being language) are not always the most important in terms of survival and evolution, even from within a speicies.

At this exact point in history, the places that have the highest literacy and the most education are the ones that use birth control- and the ones that keep their population growth rates down. Education and literacy could wipe themselves out.

Anybody buying this?

But all that changed when for the first time a generation of children learnt the language in their youth. The pidgin acquired rules of inflection, word order and grammar that made it a far more efficient and effective language -- a creole. in short, as Bickerton concluded, pidgins become creoles only after they are learnt by a generation of children, who bring instinct to bear on their transformation."
I am not at all convinced that instinct is the ONLY thing the children brought to bear; though perhaps I'm seeking more of clarification than correction. My guess is that each of those children learned "rules of inflection, word order and grammar" in their own homes, from their parents in whatever language, and then took that knowledge out into society and applied it to society's language.
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Josie, I'm not sure that I'd say whole nations might wipe themselves out of existence, but I think it's conceivable that the literate class might.

My guess is that each of those children learned "rules of inflection, word order and grammar" in their own homes, from their parents in whatever language, and then took that knowledge out into society and applied it to society's language.

I think the point was that that was their home language.

society's language

yeahbut®

that begs the question! My understanding of this area of research is that when you have a new speech community being formed from disparate roots (eg, possibly widely different mother tongues), there is a surprisingly common structure to the syntactical strategies adopted by the first generations to creolize the new language. This effect has been observed across widely varying groups of mother-tongue collections, hence leading to the suggestion that there is a 'hard-wired' language instinct at work deep in our currently evolved brains.

I think the point was that that was their home language.
I'm sorry; I failed to state my assertion that, in their own homes, people most likely spoke their native language, especially if the "society language" was awkward. (The quote said it was laboriously complex in the way it had to express things and relatively simple in what it could express. Why would they say to their child [creole] 'make milk gone', when they could say [native language] 'drink all your milk'? I am keeping in mind that the quote referred specifically to a newly-formed group of settlers.

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there is a surprisingly common structure to the syntactical strategies adopted by the first generations to creolize the new language. This effect has been observed across widely varying groups of mother-tongue collections, hence leading to the suggestion that there is a 'hard-wired' language instinct at work deep in our currently evolved brains.
Can't say I'm convinced of the hard-wired bit, but certainly can't argue against it, either. My question, though, is: why does the development have to be furthered so much by children? I should think, especially if we're "hard-wired", that the adults would do the same thing, given enough time together.
(Ooh, I lurve this thread! Speaking of lurve, Capital Kiwi, where are you on this one?)

Why would they say to their child [creole] 'make milk gone', when they could say [native language] 'drink all your milk'?

Perhaps because the two parents speak different languages to each other with limited overlap, and the kids run around in a social group that draws on perhaps 4 other languages, as a typical example! Young people are always the creative force in language development, and no more so than at the frontiers where different languages collide and recombine. The young people end up teaching their parents a new language, by sheer pressure of efficiency (to take the topic back to its origins).

A short description of the typical process is something like:
1st generation, first step: multiple mother tongues combining in confusion
1st generation, second step: creation of simple pidgin as a mutual language
2nd generation: creation and development of creolized language
later generations: evolution of creole into separate mother tongue


the adults would do the same thing, given enough time together

They do. Just observe the workings of this virtual speech community, with its rapid accretion of 'insider' code!

why does the development have to be furthered so much by children?

Because children don't have an existing structure overlaying whatever "natural" structure we may have hard-wired in our brains. One of Pinker's other notions (or at least a notion that I was introduced to by Pinker) is that grammar is reinvented every generation. We come into this world knowing not one iota of language yet, by the time we are 3 or 4 we can form semi-complex sentences and recognize "bad" grammar when we hear it. This grammar is formed from nothing but listening to and imitating the speech we hear about us; being rewarded for successful usage and mocked for unsuccessful usage. The few times we get explicit language usage instruction it is either wrong (i.e., not representative of the way our elders actually use the language, e.g., the can/may "rule") or a correction of application of a rule to an exception (e.g., a child who, up until now has been saying something like chiller as the plural of child "correcting" it to chiles or chillers).

By the time we become adults we have a good solid structure that we can use, even if that structure is almost non-existent as in the case of pidgins. The ability to use this innate grammar building talent seems to run out at about age 5 or so, which explains why many people continue to use the grammar they developed when first learning language despite the efforts of teachers to correct them. They just ain't getting them in time.

Point 1:
Interesting thing. I don't know if it's related.

As usual, I don't recall the details. This is what I think I remember.

There are different species of birds that look the same, but have different songs. You can take an egg from one species and have it nurtured raised by the other species. It will never learn the songs of either its own species or its adopted species. If bird songs are like languages, and if I have not misremembered or misrepresented, this might indicate that that there are cultural and genetic components to language (specifically grammar).


Point 2a:
Another thing I almost recall. I read somewhere (not a particularly reliable source, but I don't remember where it was for sure) that there are cases of kids who are "raised" (read 'abused') by putting them in a room and giving them no outside influences. The sad thing is that even after these kids are rescued, they never quite master their new language.

Point 2b:
Possibly corroborative anecdotal evidence. One of my best friends is this Korean fellow who was adopted by Americans. It's been a very long time since we discussed this, but I seem to recall he was adopted some time between 5 and 8 years old. In any case, this guy is really smart. But you wouldn't be able to tell it. He can't speak Korean any more except for a few words. And his English is terrible. Simple sentences are fine, but anything more complicated and it gets progressively difficult to understand what he's saying. A mutual Indian buddy was continually correcting K's English, but it just never sunk in. I interpret this as something traumatic happening to him during the time frame when he would normally be acquiring linguistic stability.


k

Jacob Bronowsky, had an essay on this in his book (and TV series) Accent of Man..

he pointed out, as a child, he had mastered Polish. and that his parents, well educated Jews, were able to get out of Poland in the mid thirties, and settle in England.

There he was age 2.5, speaking only Polish.

but by age 5 when his parents moved to US, he hardly spoke any Polish, and now as an adult he doesn't know remember any Polish at all.

But-- a critial point in his life, (age 12 months to 3 years or so) he mastered language..

Yes, humans are hard wired to see in stereo, but if a child has a "lazy eye" (or some other visual problem with a singele eye) and it doesn't get corrected.. the child effectively becomes blind in that eye..

it's not that the eye doesn't "function" -it is that there is a window of opportunity.. and if you don't use it, you lose it.

So too with language.. Hearing children of Deaf parent might learn sign langauge as their first language.. and later pick up a oral language.. and they do fine.. but they might have some difficulties.. learning to hear the difference between R and L has to be done before the age of 4--or it is not going to happen.

In Japanese, it is the difference between Su and Tsu-- these subtle difference can only be taught at a young age.. and then the pathways harden. and the brain is less flexible..

perhaps your friend, as an orphan, never really mastered korean.. and now, he is unable to master english.. he was critically shortchanged, and nothing now can be done to remidy it completely.

reading, unlike language, does not seem to be so hardwired.. it is something some one can learn to do as an adult. speach and language are not.

Re your Point 2a, FF:

There are some fascinating, and very sad, descriptions of "feral" children, who were raised from infancy without exposure to language, and the evidence suggests that they are subsequently unable to acquire language skills, particularly in the area of grammatical structure. Francois Truffaut deals with one such case in his film "The Wild Child." Another instance concerns a girl named Genie, whose parents confined her to a room in their house, with no exposure to socialization or language. Several articles and books have been written about Genie. A number of them are referenced in Google if you search for Genie + feral. (I tried to list them here, but they didn't open (?)

mav, you wrote: They do. Just observe the workings of this virtual speech community, with its rapid accretion of 'insider' code!...

Very good point there!

wwmm

rapid accretion of 'insider' code!

Rapid accretion of insider code is one thing. Wholesale creation of a grammar where essential none existed before is something quite else.

A somewhat related article appears in this month's Smithsonian Magazine, wherein there is a discussion of how children process phonics vs whole word reading. The article suggests that the "window of acquisition" may be wider than previously thought.

But I have serious doubts that literacy will evolve. (i.e., the innate sense that abstract symbols can be combined to have a myrid of meanings)
You certainly wouldn't doubt that peoples' ways with words will continue to change. And which type of change is to be called evolution will remain a matter of debate. You could say that the elimination of case endings from nouns is evolution - it makes the language easier, i.e. the combinatorial aspect prevails. On the other hand, you could call it an impoverishment in forms, the dependency on context increases, and it becomes more difficult to master the language perfectly.

Either Matt Ridley has misunderstood Steven Pinker or Jazzo's summary of Matt Ridley's book misrepresents Matt Ridley.

As I understand him, Steven Pinker's position (derived as has been noted from Chomsky) is that what is instinctual is not the particular rules of a particular language, but some sort of knowledge of what sort of syntactical and other rules are possible. Thus the child instinctively knows that adjectives could come before or after a noun and will then work out which is true for the particular language he or she is learning. The child also instinctively knows, for example, that languages do not form questions by pronouncing all the even-numbered words in a sentence backwards, and so he or she doesn't use that as a hypothesis for working out how the language concerned forms questions. In other words children innately know what clues to listen for when they are learning a language, but they still have to learn the syntax and other aspects of the particular language spoken around them.

Bingley

Thus the child instinctively knows that adjectives could come before or after a noun

Therefore, instinctively knowing that the categories of noun and adjective exist!

Okay--I was going to do read-only tonight (short on time), but I have to respond to the adjective-noun hypothesis. By instinctive knowledge, is it meant that this knowledge is present, though latent, literally at the time of our birth?I'd have a lot of trouble swallowing that.

If, by "instinct", it is meant that it develops as early language is acquired, yes, I can agree with that; no problem, because of the way we learn language. (Speaking of instinct--I'm writing based on my own, not out of having had any formal education on this subject.) Nouns are the easiest part of a language to learn, so we acquire them first, whether we are infants or students learning a foreign tongue. Teacher points..."chair"..."This is a chair". Mommy holds up a ball, and says, "ball". When the infant has mastered the noun, the descriptors come in, and I think this is a process that is both natural and necessary. We need to communicate, and we can only do that effectively if we can be specific. We can tell an infant, "I'm putting your socks on you", but if we say, "I'm putting your green socks on you", we are helping the babe to learn what we mean when, a couple of years later, we say, "Go put on your green socks".

I guess I could boil down what I'm trying to get across by saying that I think we learn nouns first, so that we know what's around us; "where we are", in other words. And the next thing we need to learn is how to differentiate between things that are called the same thing...say, shirts...for which the outcome of our actions would vary, according to our selection.

Nouns are the easiest part of a language to learn, so we acquire them first
In my opinion, this may be true for the second language, but a child first seems to aquire expressions for "good" and "bad/dangerous" (i.e. attractive and aversive), which are more like interjections/qualifiers than nouns. I think feelings are expressed before individual things are identified.

The idea is, I think, that the children are born knowing for example that there are words that name things (nouns), words for actions (verbs), and words that describe things objectively or subjectively (adjectives) and with clues about how these words might be fitted together to make sentences giving information, expressing emotion, or giving commands etc., that there are limitations on what grammatical features are possible and the child is born knowing what those limitations are.

Bingley

Oooh, I missed this one.

Chomsky's main hypothesis (since eschewed) was that there is a "universal semantic" or core of language knowledge which we all share. I don't think I ever read that he claimed that it was genetically hardwired into us, although clearly there is a genetically-conferred ability to speak.

What he stated was that there is an underlying core of meaning which we all understand and that our languages must therefore all be based on similar basic semantic structures because of this. The idea of a basement-level universal language came from this hypothesis. Did well for him, too, academically.

Of course, he was wrong. We may have syntactic and semantic structures for similar situations - the ones which are common to us all - but Chomsky was unable to show that such structures had anything in common across all languages, cultures and races.

Oh, for NicholasW to appear from nowhere and give us his view on this!

The feral children cases are certainly interesting, but it is difficult to draw any linguistic conclusions from them for several reasons, the underlying fundamental one being the necessary lack of controlled experimentation. It seems to me that the feral children fall into several categories: (1) children who, once exposed to normal social and physical supports, become remarkably well adapted, including certain skill in language (eg, Kaspar Hauser); (2) children whose skills remain stunted, by either lack of timely exposure to society and language or by inherent disabilities (eg, Kamala the wolf girl); or (3) children whose skills remain profoundly stunted, due to inherent disabilities which might have been the reason they were feral in the first place (eg, Victor of Aveyron, Peter of Hameln). It is difficult to ascertain from the few documented cases whether a particular child's abilities were the result of or the cause of his situation when first discovered by other humans. A child, for example, who suffered from a pervasive developmental disorder would continue to behave in antisocial and nonverbal way, and it is easy to imagine that he was feral because his condition caused him to wander off from his family, fail to seek help when his family was destroyed by disease or other catastrophe, or to be ousted from the family. Of course, in a few cases, we know that the children were seggregated from society for reasons unrelated to thier abilities, and those are the cases in which the children more readily readapted.

Clearly, linguistic abilities depend both on chemical and structural components of our brain and on exposure to language at an early age, but it is difficult to determine the extent to which nature and nurture influence the development of language. Both are necessary, but my own unsubstantiated opinion is that the physical disabilities have a much stronger and more absolute influence than do the social deprivations, assuming all other factors are normal (which, inevitably, they are not).