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UKCC.uky.edu>I'm just about to leave for LSRL in El Paso, and should wait until I can make a more studied answer to the post of 14 Feb on this topic. There is reference there to "language-impaired individuals" who do not have linguistic features such as 'plural' and 'tense'. Such individuals have problems, it is claimed, with completion of test sentences such as "Everyday (sic!) the man walks to school, yesterday he-----". I presume that in this illiterate test item, it would be judged that filling in the blank with "walk" would be taken to indicate language impairment. This is particularly distressing, since in much of the upper southeast such forms are dialectally normal, and that's the way you learn them from your peers who talk that way. Only fancy restaurants in the South serve "Mashed Potatoes", the simple cafes have "Mash Potatoes", including often university dining areas. I have also run into a case of a distressed mother who had been told by the speech therapist at her first grader's school that her child had a speech defect, being unable to pronounce final 'r' in words, and needed special training. Apparently these people have no knowledge of the characteristics of American speech varieties, and are willing to place the label 'handicapped' and 'inferior' on those who speak certain of these varieties. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this (aside from the psychological damage done to individual children and parents) is that it becomes a rationale for racism. Many blacks, who come, or whose parents came, from the south also speak varieties that lack final clusters of consonant plus /t/ or consonant plus /d/, as to millions of other southern speakers. Since these people say such things as /kep/ for /kept/, they must have a language deficit of some sort, and since it often extends to a whole sub-community it must be that these people are inferior in speech, and probably in other ways as well. This is also an excuse for not bothering to try to teach the impaired. My God, I didn't expect to see this sort of thing appear on a bbs dedicated to communication among linguists, even though I had despaired of speech therapists. But, after all, they come from schools of education, and are probably beyond help. Chinese is also an inferior language of an inferior culture and inferior race, since the Chinese _never_ put past or plural affixes on -- we suspected this all along, of course.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
vx.acs.umn.edu>There has been a lot of work in the past decade showing that language disorders have a heritable component to them. I think that Gopnik is the first to maintain that it can be localized to a single gene, though. A few things to keep in mind, as regards the claim that specific language impairment reflects a "grammar gene". (This term, by the way, is not meant in a technical sense, and has not been used in the papers that Gopnik has published; it's for popular consumption only. Gopnik means specifically something affecting inflectional morphology, and not wh-movement, etc.) 1) Gopnik's subjects (and everyone with specific language impairment) have a deficit in at least two, maybe three areas. In addition to inflectional morphology, they have a problem with phonology. Nothing has been published about what the phonological deficits of her adult subjects were like; in general with specific language disorder, the phonological "errors" resemble those of younger normal children (but we don't have enough specifics about statistically common/uncommon characteristics of the phonology of either disordered or normal kids to get real detailed about comparisons). The "grammar gene" (and "feature blindness") hypothesis can't explain why there is a phonological deficit as well --- or, in fact, why morphological deficits in development are invariably accompanied by phonological deficits. If there IS an explanation for this, it hasn't been proffered yet. Third, there is evidence that children with specific language disorder have some perceptual problems with the acoustic signal (though this hasn't been tested with the family that Gopnik studied, and it is possible that they don't have such problems). Neither of these other deficits by themselves completely account for the morphological deficit; e.g., these kids say /rak/ when ROCKS is appropriate, but pronounce BOX as /baks/, so it's not JUST a matter of difficulty with e.g. consonant clusters. But for the purposes of determining genetic underpinnings, you need to explain the entire set of deficits, not just one part. 2) It is premature, to say the least, to claim that any gene that may underlie this disorder is a "grammar gene" just because it messes up grammar. In fact, it may an "anti-grammar gene" -- i.e., prevent people from expressing inflectional morphology, which has an entirely different genetic basis. We have to remember that everything that a human being does has a genetic basis in one sense: if our genes don't give us the ability to do it (either specifically or as part of some flexible learning mechanism), then we can't do it; after all, we don't observe inflectional morphology or bridge designing in rats. So, of course there's a genetic underpinning to it. The question is how specific that genetic underpinning is, and what other things are needed for it to be expressed. The "grammar gene" could affect some general process used for inflectional morphology and a number of other things; by removing a necessary part of the skill, inflectional morphology is affected. (Of course, you have to say what that general process is; myself, I think that it may reflect a greater amount of inhibition between competing units at the lexical and phonological levels, but that's a different story.) There is a lesson to be learned from work on developmental dyslexia (problems with reading). This too has a heritable component, and one study a few years ago actually located the gene responsible for it. There was no attempt to call this a "reading gene", though. Why not? Because reading is just too recent a skill. Nearly universal reading is a product of the last century even in Western cultures; and, given that socioeconomic class correlates positively with reading ability but negatively with offspring (i.e., people in "lower" socioeconomic groups tend to have more offspring but read less well), it is probably impossible to come up with an evolutionary scenario where the ability to read is caused by a gene THE PURPOSE OF WHICH is to allow people to read. Instead, reading seems to depend on more general perceptual and language skills that can get messed up by other genes --- and reading seems to be the task that is most sensitive to such disruption, since dyslexics can often be highly intelligent, great musicians, etc. The term "grammar gene" implies that the gene in question is THE gene for inflectional morphology, and it doesn't do anything else. No case has yet to be made for that. 3) The claims for the "grammar gene" have yet to be based on an explicit and fully developed psychological theory of how inflectional morphology is acquired by children or used by adults. The closest offering is by Steve Pinker and his colleagues, but even they admit that most of the details are mysterious. For example, they maintain the usual linguistic division between morphological rules and phonological rules, with phonological rules determining allomorphy; but have never investigated phonological development and in fact have yet to suggest how a child sorts all the input data out into that distinction. They have yet to address the morphological difficulties (and, often, lack of difficulty) shown by Italian children with specific language disorder, which at least on the surface contradicts their claims; perhaps a different gene is involved? I have no doubt that that is a possible task, but it's hard to evaluate any claims that may rely on specific formulations about the acquisition process. Anyway, the claims being made are presently very premature. They may turn out to be right, but it's WAY too early to tell. By the way, I agree with the comments made by Alan Prince that some of the comments about this on LINGUIST have been rather too "sneering". The literature on morphology during the past several years has degenerated into a lot of sneering (see, for example, the papers addressing connectionism in COGNITION in 1988). We should all just accept that there are differences of opinion, and try to be more polite. (Hopefully, that change in attitude will come before the Milwaukee Rules Conference in April, where these issues will come up again in a public forum.) ---joe stembergerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue