[neuroling] Re: Genetics of Language
- From: "giancarlo" <giancarlo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: neuroling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 09:58:10 -0700
Joe Hilferty writes:
>Òscar Vilarroya and I argue that, at best, one might say that
>SPCH1 (= FOXP2) is the gene for *English* morphosyntax,
>since just as with aphasia, SLI profiles are contingent upon
>language type. In the case of FOXP2, we simply don't know
>for sure what the linguistic phenotype would be if the affected
>family were (e.g.) Italian. My guess is that an Italian KE
>family would have problems with articles and clitics, which
>seem to be vulnerable in Italian children with SLI.
It's true that aphasic manifestations depends also upon the speaker's native
language, nevertheless, for instance, agrammatics (usually subjects with
frontal lesions mainly focalized in Broca's area) omit Function Words
without regard to the spoken language. For instance, an English agrammatic,
in the sentence *I will go* will omit *will* while an Italian agrammatic, in
the sentence *Andro'* (I will go) will omit *-ro'*. The Same trend (omission
of function words) is reported by Grodzinsky for Hebrew-speaking subjects.
So it seems that actually we deal with different manifestations of the same
impairment.
Furthermore, if the *pruning tree hypothesis* (= agrammatics cannot build
and use a syntactic tree) is well founded, then this type of aphasia cannot
be language-specific: in every language the affected tool would be the
construction of the tree itself.
Giancarlo Buoiano.
Other related posts:
