Chomsky

[A. Katz]

I am referring to humans who were not exposed to language and therefore 
grew up feral, and to other humans who have intact brains but 
underdeveloped social skills, and who therefore remain non-verbal, 
despite normal exposure to language. I am also referring to indivduals who 
experienced sensory deprivation during the early years, and behaved like 
feral children, until a different way to expose them to language was 
found. People like Helen Keller.

I am not referring to "whole populations." I am talking about individuals 
and the environmental effect on them of exposure to language.

Innateness, if it were true as claimed for language, would mean that 
despite lack of exposure, the trait would manifest. Eye color is innate. 
Language is not. Language is learned.

    --Aya

http://hubpages.com/hub/Language-is-Learned




On Mon, 25 Oct 2010, jlmendi at unizar.es wrote:

> "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com> wrote:
>
> (...) I don't
>> think that we can predict language acquisition ability solely or even
>> primarily on the basis of genetics, as there are many healthy humans
>> who do not have comparable results to those of some parrots and
>> chimpanzees.
>
> Can you explain what are you referring to? Have you discovered human 
> populations without language, or healthy humans that have not succeed 
> acquiring language?
> Best regards:
> José-Luis Mendívil
>
>
> -- 
> Dr José-Luis Mendívil-Giró
> General Linguistics
> Universidad de Zaragoza
> Spain
>