Language Innateness: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

    Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article on:

            INNATENESS, AUTONOMY, UNIVERSALITY?
           NEUROBIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE
                    by Ralph-Axel Mueller

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current
BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to
suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to
become a BBS Associate, please send email to:

bbs at soton.ac.uk or write to:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS
    
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by
anonymous ftp (or gopher or world-wide-web) according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________
    INNATENESS, AUTONOMY, UNIVERSALITY?
    NEUROBIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE

                Ralph-Axel Mueller
                PET Center,
                Children's Hospital of Michigan,
                Wayne State University,
                Detroit MI 48201-2196,
                USA
                rmueller at pet.wayne.edu

    KEYWORDS: brain development, dissociations, distributive
    representations, epigenesis, evolution, functional
    localization, individual variation, innateness, language.

    ABSTRACT: The concepts of the innateness, universality,
    species-specificity, and autonomy of the human language
    capacity have had an extreme impact on the psycholinguistic
    debate for over thirty years. These concepts are evaluated from
    several neurobiological perspectives, with an emphasis on the
    emergence of language and its decay due to brain lesion and
    progressive brain disease.

    Evidence of perceptuomotor homologies and preadaptations for
    human language in nonhuman primates suggests a gradual
    emergence of language during hominid evolution.  Regarding
    ontogeny, the innate component of language capacity is likely
    to be polygenic and shared with other developmental domains.
    Dissociations between verbal and nonverbal development are
    probably rooted in the perceptuomotor specializations of neural
    substrates rather than the autonomy of a grammar module.
    Aphasiological data often assumed to suggest modular linguistic
    subsystems can be accounted for in terms of a neurofunctional
    model incorporating perceptuomotor-based regional
    specializations and distributivity of representations. Thus,
    dissociations between grammatical functors and content words
    are due to different conditions of acquisition and resulting
    differences in neural representation.  Since human brains are
    characterized by multifactorial interindividual variability,
    strict universality of functional organization is biologically
    unrealistic.

    A theoretical alternative is proposed according to which (a)
    linguistic specialization of brain areas is due to epigenetic
    and probabilistic maturational events, not to genetic
    'hard-wiring', and (b) linguistic knowledge is neurally
    represented in distributed cell assemblies whose topography
    reflects the perceptuomotor modalities involved in the
    acquisition and use of a given item of knowledge.

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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable by anonymous ftp from
ftp.princeton.edu according to the instructions below (the filename is
bbs.mueller). Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft.
Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise
you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article.
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    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.mueller
    ftp://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.mueller

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   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
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anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
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cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
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get bbs.mueller
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