form

[Elizabeth Bates]

But shall we assume (and I promise NOT to say "Dear Fritz...") that you
DID endorse the claim that the genetic basis of grammatical morphology
has been discovered?  That claim has made the rounds for several years,
it is all based on a premature report about the K Family in London, and
the report is stunningly wrong.  Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and her colleagues,
who have studied this family for years and were in no way responsible
for the original report (a letter to Nature by Myrna Gopnik) published
a thorough study of the family in 1995 in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, showing that there is absolutely no dissociation
between regular and irregular morphology, or (for that matter) between
grammar and other aspects of language, because the affected members of
the family are significantly worse than the unaffected members on a host
of different languages tests and on a number of non-linguistic measures
as well.  They also have a serious form of buccal-facial apraxia, i.e.
they have a hard time with complex movements of the mouth, so severe
that some members of the family supplement their speech at home with
a home signing system.  A separate paper (not in the Proceedings) shows
that they also have a hard time (relative to familial controls) with
a finger-tapping task!

Imagine the following tabloid headline: "Elton John and Lady Diana
spent hot night together in Paris."  You buy the paper, open up to
page 17, and discover that they spent the night together with 400
other people at a party.  Kind of changes the interpretation, no?
In the same vein, the grammatical deficits displayed by the affected
members of this family are part of a huge complex of deficits, in no
way specific to grammar much less to specific aspects of morphology.
But the rumor continues to be passed around....-liz