The biological basis of language: insight from developmental grammatical impairments

Lely, Heather K. J. van der; Pinker, Steven

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.07.001

Cited by 68 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…It is well known that we see similar though amplified symptoms in language comprehension by agrammatic aphasics (Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen, & Kiran, 2015). Finally, Van der Lely and Pinker (2014) argue that a particular population of children with specific language impairment behave as though they are processing language through something like a linear grammar. The literature frequently describes these so-called Bstrategies^or Bheuristics^as something separate from language.…”

Section: Conceptual Structuresmentioning

confidence: 73%

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language

Jackendoff

Wittenberg

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.

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Section: Conceptual Structuresmentioning

confidence: 73%

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language

Jackendoff

Wittenberg

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…This constitutes universal grammar (UG), which historically has only been predicted to be subject to IDs in exceptional cases (e.g., neurocognitive disorders [14]). However, recent proposals incorporate concepts that may predict IDs.…”

Section: Theoretical Traditions In Language Acquisition and Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

Kidd

Donnelly

Christiansen³

2018

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

353

231

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“…But there are many other disorders with genetic bases where genomes of afflicted individuals shed light on genes involved in language (I will call these Blanguage-related genes,^or LRGs). Relevant disorders can either be rather specific to components of language, like FOXP2, specific language impairment (van der Lely & Pinker, 2014), or dyslexia (Mozzi et al, 2016;St Pourcain et al, 2014;Wang, Chen, et al, 2015), or they can be broader disorders like autism, which have important consequences for, but are not specific to, language (Graham & Fisher, 2015;Raff, 2014;RodenasCuadrado, Ho, & Vernes, 2014). A particularly interesting result involves CNTNAP2, a gene coding for a neurexin specifically expressed in the human cortex and involved in cortical development.…”

Section: The Short Time Scale: Comparing Human Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

2017

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The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that investigate past events, such as geology or cosmology. Well-crafted models of language evolution make numerous testable hypotheses, and if the principles of strong inference (simultaneous testing of multiple plausible hypotheses) are adopted, there is an increasing amount of relevant data allowing empirical evaluation of such models. The articles in this special issue provide a concise overview of current models of language evolution, emphasizing the testable predictions that they make, along with overviews of the many sources of data available to test them (emphasizing comparative, neural, and genetic data). The key challenge facing the study of language evolution is not a lack of data, but rather a weak commitment to hypothesistesting approaches and strong inference, exacerbated by the broad and highly interdisciplinary nature of the relevant data. This introduction offers an overview of the field, and a summary of what needed to evolve to provide our species with language-ready brains. It then briefly discusses different contemporary models of language evolution, followed by an overview of different sources of data to test these models. I conclude with my own multistage model of how different components of language could have evolved.

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The biological basis of language: insight from developmental grammatical impairments

Cited by 68 publications

References 68 publications

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

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