Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Language and neuroplasticity

Interesting post on this with respect to blindness, which partially relates to some stuff I'm working on now. Michael Tomasello is one of the big opponents of Chomskyan UG, but even he argues in favor of a biological basis for language. It seems to me that the larger debate is over between nativism and empiricism when it comes to language -- there is a "language instict," "mental organ," or whatever you want to call it. The question is to what degree are linguistic and syntactic rules pre-specified by neural/cognitive architecture. Tomasello, and other research like what I posted above, make a compelling case that Chomskyan/Pinkerian psychology overestimates the extent to which language is pre-specified. However, I think their ideas have proven correct in the broad sense -- that there is this mental organ, though it appears to be more plastic than they originally posited. As for the specifics, I don't know what the score is. I haven't read much of Tomasello's work that relates specifically to language, this is just what I've gleaned from his work in theory of mind, which serves as the basis for his theory of language. (He sees it as a special case of the imitative capacities granted by the innate theory of mind.) The degree to which language is localized in the brain leads me to believe that Tomasello is understating how much of it is pre-specified, though I don't know by how much. Not really surprising all in all, though -- my guess before reading his work and related stuff was more or less a vaguer version of what I wrote above.