Re: Cognitive Linguistics, "The Language Instinct", and High-Functioning Autistics

Hallo!

On Sat, 13 May 2006 19:03:48 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> It is surely uncontroversial that there is a 'language instinct', i.e. that
> human infants have a talent for learning language, which wanes at puberty.
I think what is controversial about the "language instinct" is mainly the
term, not so much the phenomenon itself.  There can be no doubt that humans
have an innate faculty for learning languages which non-human animals lack
(as numerous failed attempts to teach languages to non-human animals show),
and it is also evident that learning languages becomes more difficult
towards adulthood.

> There has traditionally been controversy over what is the content (nature
> and amount) of this faculty. To my (pretty meagre) knowledge, the most
> egregiously unparsimonious theories of the content of the language faculty
> have been Transformational Grammar c. 1965--1992, and Optimality Theory.
What bugs me about those and several other theories is that they describe
language in terms that seem very artificial and remote from the way laypeople
perceive it, and probably are equally remote from the way our brains actually
process language.  What also bugs me about many such theories is that they
break down when one attempts to apply them to "exotic" languages that
substantially differ in their grammatical structure from English - it has
indeed been claimed that many contemporary theories of language are in fact
just theories of English, and I seem to remmeber reading somewhere that
Chomsky doesn't speak any foreign language, though I don't know whether
that's true.  It is probably true with many of his successors, though.

On Sat, 13 May 2006 19:10:14 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> I'd thought that autistics have relatively unimpaired language, but highly
> impaired pragmatics (i.e. impaired Theory of Mind faculty). And in contrast,
> Williams Syndrome has highly impaired language but very proficient
> pragmatics (unimpaired Theory of Mind faculty). Or something like that.
> Maybe I'd got it wrong.
Autism often goes along with speech disorder.  Many autists don't speak at
all; many speak in "pathological" ways (e.g. echolaly); many, many autists
take everything literally and cannot "read between the lines".  But lighter
forms of autism, such as Asperger's syndrome, indeed do not involve clinically
relevant peculiarities of language.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf