Language Innateness: BBS Call for Commentators

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(a)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(a)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. -------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ------------------------------------------------------------- These files are also on the World Wide Web and the easiest way to retrieve them is with Netscape, Mosaic, gopher, archie, veronica, etc. Here are some of the URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: 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 To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/BBS To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): get bbs.mueller When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit ---------- Where the above procedure is not available there are two fileservers: ftpmail(a)decwrl.dec.com and bitftp(a)pucc.bitnet that will do the transfer for you. To one or the other of them, send the following one line message: help for instructions (which will be similar to the above, but will be in the form of a series of lines in an email message that ftpmail or bitftp will then execute for you). -------------------------------------------------------------