5 - (Evidence for) the language instinct

Summary

The idea of a language instinct invites discussions on the role of genetics, such as the relatively recent debate about the gene for language. The selectively intact status of language in individuals with impaired non-verbal cognition presents the opposite side of the coin. The property of recursion has been shown to characterize the cognitive abilities, such as music, arithmetic, theory of mind, and visuo-spatial processing. In recent years, the use of functional neuro-imaging in brain studies has included the study of language knowledge and language processing as well. Language processing data from functional neuro-imaging in healthy adults converge on the finding that Broca's area is crucially involved in the processing of syntactic dependencies. One of the main arguments for linguistic nativism concerns the outcome of language acquisition: the language acquired is under-determined by the input, that is, the data available to the child.