The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
13. What Happens if You are Raised without Language?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Susan Curtiss [+]
UCLA
Susan Curtiss is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UCLA. She is the author of Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day ‘Wild Child’, as well as of close to one hundred journal articles and book chapters. She has also authored numerous language tests, including the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation (the CYCLE), used by researchers across the U.S. and overseas. Her research spans the study of language and mind, the ‘critical period’ for first language acquisition, Specific Language Impairment (SLI), mental retardation, epilepsy, adult aphasia, progressive dementia, the genetics of language, and language development following hemispherectomy (removal of one hemisphere of the brain) in childhood. Her current work focuses on mapping grammar onto the brain in normal and epileptic adults.
Description
This chapter provides a description of language deprivation using examples from both individual cases and the deaf population. The consequences of language deprivation FOR the development of grammar as well as the lateralization of language in the brain are briefly discussed. The possibility that development of grammar during early childhood may trigger the pre-programmed lateralization of all higher-level cognition in the brain is raised.