To add, there are many myths about learning languages that pervade. There are many myths in many areas of science too. They usually start due to the kind of misrepresentation I believe we’re seeing here - it’s common so you’ll no doubt carry around many more than you see in others.

It’s tough to know what’s what, and then question said ‘knowing’ :D

It blew my mind when I heard about this too. It’s no joke. Have a look, just search The Man with no Language. — I like sushi

I just had a brief look, but I can tell already that it's not rigorous enough. Studying human beings without language is very interesting, but we have to be very careful before we throw out a widely held idea (for good reasons). One case study doesn't doesn't quite cut it. But I'll take a look at it. Maybe it does show that there's no critical period -- I'm not married to the idea, just very cautious, as it tends to make good sense.

Some criticism just from a Wikipedia search: "The process of Ildefonso's language acquisition and his lingusitic skills are described unsystematically and anecdotally, if at all. Instead of data, [Schaller] presents many emotional intuitions and wild guesses about Ildefonso's 'languageless' mental word. Thus the claims made by the author in relation to language (acquisition) in Ildefonso do not have a sound empirical basis. [...] given the poor documentation of Ildefonso's language skills and the contradictory information on his linguistic, social, and communicative background, there is no other choice than to treat [Schaller's] book with a maximum of caution." Language Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 664-665

To add, there are many myths about learning languages that pervade. — I like sushi

And many dogmas too, yes.

Also, are you familiar with the tadoma method for there deafblind? People can get a complex understanding of language from this. It's never been shown to work for those who lost sight and hearing before the age of about 18 months. Indirect evidence like this is persuasive.

I disagree. In fact, it's very hard to see how the capacity for language -- a digital infinite system -- could have evolved slowly. You don't go from one word to an infinite number of words in gradual steps. The language capacity evolved through some sort of rewiring of the brain, no doubt, but it's more likely this happened in an individual 200,000 or so years ago. — Xtrix

What are you basing this on?

Firstly, our capacity for language is not infinite. The number of possible sequences of sounds we can make is infinite, but we cannot sounds indefinitely. We acquire shared language at a limited rate, and we have a limited capacity to store information pertaining to language (the idea-symbol relationships encoded in the brain).

Secondly, words and language as we know them aren't the only kind of communication. As evolving social animals, our distant ancestors (the tree of hominids we're related to, and beyond) have been refining language capacity for eons. The cortical language centers of the brain don't need auditory information to do language processing, it's just a quicker and easier way to make more language signs than hand movements. This is why deaf people have sign languages that have nothing to do with sound or spoken words whatsoever (their brains repurpose the unused cortical space to do more visual processing (along with other sensory data).

Canines also have language processing centers in their brains; they're less powerful versions of us, and they cannot do vocalizations like us, but if they could you would be surprised how coherent they can be.



We've been eugenically selecting dogs that are able to understand us (at least to some extent), so it's not surprising that they're capable of performing basic feats of language.

You may want to conclude that if we can set dogs down the vocal language road in just a few thousand years of artificial selection, this is evidence of the sudden emergence of communication skills in our ancestral homonids, but we could also interpret this as evidence that the basic language and communication structures are far more ancient (and have been cooking for far longer) than Chomsky wants to reckon.

A sudden "re-wiring of the brain in an individual" is incredibly fantastical. It's entirely possible that a small adaptation which enhanced language capacity snowballed as the mutation spread and refined, but this optimization would be gradual (and is in fact still occurring to this day). Some people are born with cognitive profiles that are better or worse at language processing (for example, Autism has been linked with topological brain differences, and plausibly corresponding differences in cognitive profile, such as the trend of increased spatial reasoning capacity, and reduced social and linguistic capacities).

There is no miraculous infinite language capacity, just a varying spectra of complex learning structures, all of which take ages to emerge, optimize, and evolve. The emergence of dynamic vocal chords probably played a role in the rapid optimization of preexisting communication faculties (toward,for example, increased vocabulary capacity), but this too would have occurred gradually.

I think that, given how little we know about the origins of language, speculation about it is appropriate at this stage.

I also want to caution that the speculative side of Chomsky's linguistics is only part of it – the part that's been most influential in linguistics is the application of new (in the mid-20th c.) mathematical tools to the practice of writing explicit 'generative' grammars, which is more like a formal science and has been enormously fruitful.

I'm also not sure that thinking about language in terms of its 'purpose,' communication or otherwise, is helpful. There is probably no well-defined 'purpose' for which it arose.

You misunderstand - Chomsky et. al. effectively say that the FLN ('faculty of language in the narrow sense', which includes only recursion and nothing else) should not be considered to be adaptive. They want instead to insist that it is exaptive - it evolved for some other, entirely unspecified, entirely speculative, and entirely theoretically unsubstantiated purpose. Literally, they throw out a few half-hearted guesses ("If, however, one entertains the hypothesis that recursion evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships, then it is possible that other animals have such abilities") without providing a single rationale whatsoever for why it would have done so in any of these cases. Not even an undergraduate would get away with such a hand-wavy, completely unargued-for line of reasoning. — StreetlightX

I have no particular sympathy with Chomsky on this line (I don't study this, or much care one way or the other), but to demand just-so stories at this stage, and reject a hypothesis on account of having agnostic elements seems to me not to be a good idea. What details we demand depends on the state of our knowledge, which at present is too poor to demand fully worked-out stories.

We have the ability to either create language from some faculty or we’re born with a faculty to create language - what’s the difference? If we’re to define language as necessarily requiring ‘syntax and grammar’ then we have our answer (or rather, the question then becomes ‘what is syntax and grammar’?) — I like sushi

I don't know how many times I have to say this: this is not a debate over whether or not we inherit certain predispositions for language. That we do is, I agree, undeniable. But this is not what is at issue. The relevant question is what is inherited, and how this inheritance (which magically evolved) functions to underpin the FLN. Chomsky offers not a single biological mechanism that would meet these two criteria, other than to handwave some kind of evolutionary exaptation as a promissory note in its place. This is like trying to say that we've inherited the ability to walk without talking about legs and gravity, and then, to add insult to injury, further speculating that we may never know what allows us to walk, other than to note that we possess 'the faculty' for it. It's so incredibly stupid that anyone who who even feels a jot of sympathy for Chomsky should feel their intelligence insulted.

It should further be noted that the 'faculty' in question is quite precisely defined by Chomsky as the FLN, which "comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces". That's it. If you're wondering out loud if the faulty is some manner of ability to utilize 'syntax and grammar', you're not discussing Chomsky but something else totally irrelevant. Chomsky's proposal is at once very specific (it's the FLN, which is comprised of recursion, exclusively), and entirely undertheorized (how is it inherited, and how does it function?: NFI). If you're not dealing with that specificity, you're not dealing with Chomsky.

I also want to caution that the speculative side of Chomsky's linguistics is only part of it – the part that's been most influential in linguistics is the application of new (in the mid-20th c.) mathematical tools to the practice of writing explicit 'generative' grammars, which is more like a formal science and has been enormously fruitful. — Snakes Alive

Yes. That is basically why I am baffled by Streetlight’s comment.

That doesn’t follow. The point is to narrow down the fuel for the system. As an analogy we could say liquid makes an engine run and fill our cars with coffee - that doesn’t mean engines don’t function. — I like sushi

What are you even talking about? Fuel? Coffee? Engines? Be specific, or don't bother. The charge of unfalsifiability in response to Chomsky's own response to the Pirahã is not mine alone, but well acknowledged among those who follow this stuff. Here are Tomasello and Ibbotson: "Chomsky tried to define the components of the essential tool kit of language—the kinds of mental machinery that allow human language to happen. Where counterexamples have been found, some Chomsky defenders have responded that just because a language lacks a certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean hat it is not in the tool kit. In the same way, just because a culture lacks salt to season food does not mean salty is not in its basic taste repertoire. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable".

There's a misunderstanding here. What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recursive language. This isn't so, since they obviously can speak Portuguese. It's not that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable – it's that the target of falsification was misplaced.

But the claims about Pirahã are false anyway.

I have no particular sympathy with Chomsky on this line (I don't study this, or much care one way or the other), but to demand just-so stories at this stage, and reject a hypothesis on account of having agnostic elements seems to me not to be a good idea — Snakes Alive

Except it's far from merely 'agnostic'. It's committed to a particular view in which evolutionary gradualism is ruled out in favour of a kind of linguistic evolutionary catastrophism. And of course, what motivates this is not a shred of empirical evidence (other than the mere possibility of sharp evolutionary breaks as demonstrated in other wholly unrelated domains) but an a priori theoretical commitment to cutting langauge off from all history and all society so as to make it a wholly cognitive phenomenon. History, evolution, and society are all incredibly inconvenient for the thesis, so they get nothing but the most cursory and mind-bogglingly parsed-down treatment as could be possible.

What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recursive language. — Snakes Alive

This is hilarious. Insofar as Chomsky's program is so disconnected from reality that is only deals with postulated potentials, the only apparent way to falsify it is to show that a potential does not exist. And of course, if never manifests in actual fact, the Chomskite simply falls back on the completely convenient idea that because it's just a potential, you wouldn't be able to observe it anyway. Self-insulating, pseudo-scientific trash.

Well guess what. I have the potential to turn anything I touch into gold. Only, the only way for you to falsify this, is to prove that this potential does not exist. Until then, you're just going to have to assume that I can do exactly this.

Finally, you'll understand if I take unsubstantiated claims from internet randos that 'claims about Pirahã are false anyway' with a grain of salt.

Except it's far from merely 'agnostic'. It's committed to a particular view in which evolutionary gradualism is ruled out in favour of a kind of linguistic catastrophism. — StreetlightX

Sure, I agree. It's a substantive speculative hypothesis. Maybe it's crazy – but I think crazy hypotheses are still fair game, while the field is open.

And of course, what motivates this is not a shred of empirical evidence (other than the mere possibility of sharp evolutionary breaks as demonstrated in other wholly unrelated domains) but an a priori theoretical commitment to cutting langauge off from all history and all society so as to make it a wholly cognitive phenomenon. History, evolution, and society are all incredibly inconvenient for the thesis, so they get nothing but the most cursory and mind-bogglingly parsed-down treatment as could be possible. — StreetlightX

When you don't know what's happened, you often start off by fielding possibilities, and asking what would have to be true for them to hold up. Later, when you know more, you can see how the speculations hold up. Refusing to entertain the possibilities off the bat isn't a good idea.

This is hilarious. Insofar as Chomsky's program is so disconnected from reality that is only deals with postulated potentials, the only apparent way to falsify it is to show that a potential does not exist. And of course, if never manifests in actual fact, the Chomskite simply falls back on the completely convenient idea that because it's just a potential, you wouldn't be able to observe it anyway. Self-insulating, pseudo-scientific trash. — StreetlightX

Can you reexplain in your own words what Chomsky's objection was, or can you repeat back to me my construal of it? I ask because I can't tell from this post whether you understand the objection. If you don't, then your anger may be due to a misunderstanding.

Refusing to entertain the possibilities off the bat isn't a good idea. — Snakes Alive

It is when the price to pay for it is so incredibly high. Hewing to Chomsky's linguistic program means disregarding history, society, child development, evolution, anthropology, and all the rest of it. This follows from his construal of language as a wholly cognitive phenomenon, utterly disconnected from function. It's like saying that intelligent design ought to be entertained as a research program because hey, let a thousand theoretical flowers bloom. Well sure, but relegate it to a basement where cranks can do as they like.

The funny thing is that as it's become clearer and clearer just how ridiculous Chomsky's ideas have been - even to Chomsky himself - it's actual content has become thinner and thinner as all the various proposals for what once counted as 'universal' have been dropped, one by one, by Chomsky himself. The whole principles and parameters framework? Gone. To the point where the only thing left standing is the thin gruel of 'recursion', which itself is utterly controversial. Hence the so called 'minimalist program', which is nothing but an admission of total defeat and an attempt to salvage the wreck that is the generative grammar program.

Can you reexplain in your own words what Chomsky's objection was, or can you repeat back to me my construal of it? — Snakes Alive

I've made my point twice, and even quoted other authors on it. If you still don't get it, then the problem lies elsewhere.

Hewing to Chomsky's linguistic program means disregarding history, society, child development, evolution, anthropology, and all the rest of it. This follows from his construal of language as a wholly cognitive phenomenon, utterly disconnected from function. — StreetlightX

Chomsky does not claim that language is disconnected from these things. He thinks it has a different relation to them, to be sure, but the idea that being a Chomskyan involves wholesale 'disregarding' them is not plausible. Or at least, it would take a huge amount of argument not present in this thread.

To the point where the only thing left standing is the thin gruel of 'recursion', which itself is utterly controversial. — StreetlightX

I don't understand – is the Chomskyan program non-empirical and unfalsifiable, or is it controversial and flying the face of empirical evidence? Surely it can't be both? This is the problem, when we don't stop to clarify what it is we take ourselves to be attacking.

I've made my point twice, and even quoted other authors on it. If you still don't get it, then the problem lies elsewhere. — StreetlightX

I don't want to know what you said – I want to know what Chomsky said. What, in your own words, is Chomsky's objection? Not a criticism of it – a statement of the position itself.

He thinks it has a different relation to them, to be sure, but the idea that being a Chomskyan involves wholesale 'disregarding' them is not plausible — Snakes Alive

It seems you're simply not familiar with what you're talking about, which of course, you admitted, but this is where it starts to matter: the whole point of the generative grammar program is to discover the principles of linguistic competence - these principles are meant to be transhistoric and transcultural, so much so that, as our friend the threadstarter seems to celebrate, not even communication ought to be taken into account. In fact the principles are meant to be so abstract, that they are meant to have no relation to meaning at all. They are meant to be entirely syntactical, shorn of any semantic relevance. I mean, this is simply built-in to the program. To the degree that there have been Comskities who try to bring history and culture back into it - and there have been - it's largely been an exercise in retro-fitting and hand-waving; not unlike intelligent design arguments in the face of evolutionary ones.

So no, I don't take your ignorance on the matter as an index of what Chomsky's program entails.

What, in your own words, is Chomsky's objection? Not a criticism of it – a statement of the position itself. — Snakes Alive

I'm not restating shit. If you have an issue with what I said, tell me what it is. I'm not here to entertain you.

I'm not restating shit. If you have an issue with what I said, tell me what it is. I'm not here to entertain you. — StreetlightX

I've already told you what my issue is, though, twice – I can't tell from what you've written whether you understand Chomsky's objection, and so I can't address what you say until I know whether you do, and if you don't understand it, what you don't understand.

That's why I've asked you to tell me, in your own words, what it is Chomsky is objecting to with the Pirahã case, and why.

––––

So let's suppose you're not willing to do this – I don't know why, or why you're so angry at me. I'll give it a shot as to what I think, based on what you've said, you don't understand. Chomsky's hypothesis is about a language faculty present in human beings, not about the features of a particular language. Therefore, a particular language lacking a certain quality cannot, in principle, act as evidence against it. This is, in my own words, what I think Chomsky was saying.

Now, you've said this renders the theory unfalsifiable. But that is not right – it does rule out a specific kind of data as irrelevant to it, but this is true of all theories! They are relevant to some things, and not to others. The target of falsification has therefore been misunderstood. What would have been relevant to falsifying it would have been facts about Pirahã speakers, and their inability to learn a recursive language, not facts about the Pirahã language. This doesn't make the hypothesis unfalsifiable – it just clarifies what it is about. The reason that I wanted you to restate Chomsky's position to me, before saying this, is that perhaps you already understand this, and don't need to be told. But I can't tell from what you've said whether this is so, because your criticisms do not unambiguously evince an understanding of this point.

–––––

I also need to stress, again – the Pirahã claims are not even true! The language does have recursive structures, some of which are documented in Everett's own work. It's important to keep that in mind.

The target of falsification has therefore been misunderstood. What would have been relevant to falsifying it would have been facts about Pirahã speakers, and their inability to learn a recursive language, not facts about the Pirahã language — Snakes Alive

Sure, and this is what I addressed: by so sharply demarcating the 'faculty' of language (as a 'basis for acquiring and using individual languages') from actual language use, evidence now has to bear on a potential (a 'faculty'). But by doing this, by 'changing the target of falsification' from actual language use to a sheer potential, this effectively translates to unfalsifiability. Why? Because you can't test for the absence of potential (/of a faculty), only a presence. Both the absence and presence of a potential 'look' exactly the same. The only thing you can test for is actual language use, and all that can confirm, trivially, is that the potential for something is there (just in case where the actual capacity is manifested). And of course, if recursion does not show in actual language-use, one simply says: 'ah but the potential is there, what actually happens is irrelavent'. This is Chomsky's 'rebuttal'.

Like I said, it's as if I were to claim that I have the 'faculty' for my touch to turn things into gold, but that, just because you don't see me turning things into gold, this doesn't mean I don't have the potential to. I simply have the faculty to turn things into gold ('the basis for turning things into gold with my touch') - your empirical evidence be damned.

the whole point of the generative grammar program is to discover the principles of linguistic competence - these principles are meant to be transhistoric and transcultural, so much so that, as our friend the threadstarter seems to celebrate, not even communication ought to be taken into account. In fact the principles are meant to be so abstract, that they are meant to have no relation to meaning at all. They are meant to be entirely syntactical, shorn of any semantic relevance. I mean, this is simply built-in to the program. — StreetlightX

Sounds like that is almost a reductive scientific approach. Limited, yes. Redundant?

Gradualism or otherwise isn’t really an issue for me tbh as I don’t see a meaning of determining one over the other, nor do I believe there is necessarily one over the other and it’s likely down to how we currently delineate between items of interest. I’m not one for applying Occam’s Razor to highly complex phenomena.

Is your view VERY basically that language is a more or less a circumstance of other human facilities?

But by doing this, by 'changing the target of falsification' from actual language use to a sheer potential, this effectively translates to unfalsifiability. Why? Because you can't test for the absence of potential (/of a faculty), only a presence. — StreetlightX

But this is just not true. For example, exposing a chimp to Portuguese will not result in the chimp learning it; but exposing a Pirahã person to it does result in them learning it in the normal way. The presence or absence of a potential is revealed when, under the hypothesized conditions, it actualizes or fails to actualize.

The presence or absence of a potential is revealed when, under the hypothesized conditions, it actualizes or fails to actualize. — Snakes Alive

What conditions? That's the nub: Chomsky's 'conditions' amount to 'is human + has evolved'. Why and how? No answer. It's arbitrary, unscientific nonsense.

No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied.

What you quoted was just the more general point, though – clearly the issue can't be that something appeals to potentials or dispositions. There would be little science without such appeals.

No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied. — Snakes Alive

That would be a great answer if Chomsky was not famous for entirely disregading linguisitc development in children, because that's precisely the kind of thing GG is designed to exclude from relevance.

Again, it really helps to actually know the position you're meant to be defending.

Chomsky is most certainly not famous for that –

Generative grammar has always had an interest in linguistic acquisition. Chomsky's whole schtick has always been explanatory adequacy, that is that grammars should reflect the way languages develop in children (not only that they reflect the empirical facts of adult language use). In fact the entire point of postulating UG to begin with was as a means to explain child language acquisition.

And in fact looking only at 'actual language use' prevents one from talking about this explanatory adequacy, because actual use will be consistent with any number of grammars, and the actual use of the language in its developed state is consistent with any number of hypotheses about how that state comes to be in the child.

Chomsky's whole schtick has always been explanatory adequacy, that is that grammars should reflect the way languages develop in children (not only that they reflect the empirical facts of adult language use). — Snakes Alive

Chomsky's interest in developmental studies have always been limited to confirming his a priori theories, which of course, they consistently fail to do, requiring all sorts of curve-fitting to make them hold up:

"A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules. (The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is invoked.) Yet much research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way. Rather young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then, gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.

...The main response of universal grammarians to such findings is that children have the competence with grammar but that other factors can impede their performance and thus both hide the true nature of their grammar and get in the way of studying the “pure” grammar posited by Chomsky’s linguistics. Among the factors that mask the underlying grammar, they say, include immature memory, attention and social capacities.

As with the retreat from the cross-linguistic data and the tool-kit argument, the idea of performance masking competence is also pretty much unfalsifiable. Retreats to this type of claim are common in declining scientific paradigms that lack a strong empirical base—consider, for instance, Freudian psychology and Marxist interpretations of history.

... Even beyond these empirical challenges to universal grammar, psycholinguists who work with children have difficulty conceiving theoretically of a process in which children start with the same algebraic grammatical rules for all languages and then proceed to figure out how a particular language - whether English or Swahili— connects with that rule scheme. Linguists call this conundrum the linking problem, and a rare systematic attempt to solve it in the context of universal grammar was made by Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker for sentence subjects. Pinker’s account, however, turned out not to agree with data from child development studies or to be applicable to grammatical categories other than subjects. And so the linking problem—which should be the central problem in applying universal grammar to language learning—has never been solved or even seriously confronted." (source)

Seriously, the Chomskian response to reality not fitting the theories has been to claim that reality is not good enough. Bullshit at every turn.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-chomskys-theory-of-language-wrong-pinker-weighs-in-on-debate/

Eh, again I have no particular sympathy for Chomsky, but these reactions are hyperbolic, even hysterical. Complaining that a scientific theory postulates an ideal object that is then subject to performance constraints doesn't seem like an interesting criticism to me. That's how a lot of science works, and there's nothing methodologically objectionable about it per se (it does not, pace your claims, make a theory unfalsifiable that it works in this way). If there are valid criticisms of Chomsky, one would hope they'd be better than this.

The article you linked to is...well, embarrassing, frankly. It seems to imply, early on, that Chomskyans thought that a universal grammar literally meant that all the world's languages had a structure similar to the European languages the researchers spoke (not only is this not true, but Chomsky was a scholar of Hebrew, a Semitic language, and generativists were early on studying languages like Japanese – that languages existed in a wide variety was utterly common knowledge, of which everyone was aware, including him and the other generativists!) The article also repeats the myth about Pirahã.

You should know you're not getting a good depiction of your purported ideological opponent, and you should know this because if you want to criticize something, you have an interest that it's represented accurately to you.

Eh, again I have no particular sympathy for Chomsky, but these reactions are hyperbolic, even hysterical. Complaining that a scientific theory postulates an ideal object that is then subject to performance constraints doesn't seem like an interesting criticism to me. That's how a lot of science works, and there's nothing methodologically objectionable about it per se (it does not, pace your claims, make a theory unfalsifiable that it works in this way). If there are valid criticisms of Chomsky, one would hope they'd be better than this. — Snakes Alive

:up:

Sounds like that is almost a reductive scientific approach. Limited, yes. Redundant? — I like sushi

Yes. Chomsky developed his views at a time when computational reductionism was all the rage, and when AI was thought to be just around the corner, and that intelligence would yield if we just learnt how to manipulate symbols better. It was outdated at the time of its incipience, and it's the equivalent of an intellectual zombie as it stands today.

Is your view VERY basically that language is a more or less a circumstance of other human facilities? — I like sushi

I don't know what 'human facilities' are meant to be, but I do believe that language must be studied in the context of it's history, development, and socio-cultural specificities, along with it's biological and cognitive aspects. I believe in a kind of wholism and embeddedness of language, if it could be put that way. The exact opposite, that is, of the Chomskian program which seeks to isolate, dehistoricize, desocialize, and place language under the air-tight seal of a hermeticism for nothing more than ideological prejudice.

I just had a brief look, but I can tell already that it's not rigorous enough. Studying human beings without language is very interesting, but we have to be very careful before we throw out a widely held idea (for good reasons). One case study doesn't doesn't quite cut it. But I'll take a look at it. Maybe it does show that there's no critical period -- I'm not married to the idea, just very cautious, as it tends to make good sense. — Xtrix

Of course. I’ve never read her book and she openly admits that her method wasn’t scientific and that she is no linguist. Nevertheless I have looked at various accounts of this and I don’t believe this is a made up story at all - too many people verify the account. The main critique I’ve seen is some kind of attempt to parcel off ‘deafness’ as some contributor to this? Something also done in regard to the language created by deaf Nicaraguan children.

When it comes to language I’m much more interested in more obscure ideas and thoughts involving comparisons with various seemingly unconnected fields of interest. How/Why human languages evolved the way they evolved is interesting to speculate over, but I don’t find it anywhere near as interesting as several other items of neurogenesis (my opinion is that the question over such distinctions is too simplistically formed).