The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Page A

indicating the number “nineteen.”
“Oh, you were in the Coast Guard for nineteen years.”
“Oh…boy…right…right,” he replied.
“Why are you in the hospital, Mr. Ford?”
Ford looked at me a bit strangely, as if to say, Isn’t it patently obvious? He pointed to his paralyzed arm and said, “Arm no good,” then to his mouth and said, “Speech…can’t say…talk, you see.”
“What happened to you to make you lose your speech?”
“Head, fall, Jesus Christ, me no good, str, str…oh Jesus…stroke.”
“I see. Could you tell me, Mr. Ford, what you’ve been doing in the hospital?”
“Yes, sure. Me go, er, uh, P.T. nine o’cot, speech…two times…read…wr…ripe, er, rike, er, write…practice…get-ting better.”
“And have you been going home on weekends?”
“Why, yes…Thursday, er, er, er, no, er, Friday…Bar-ba-ra…wife…and, oh, car…drive…purnpike…you know…rest and…tee-vee.”
“Are you able to understand everything on television?”
“Oh, yes, yes…well…al-most.”
     
    Obviously Mr. Ford had to struggle to get speech out, but his problems were not in controlling his vocal muscles. He could blow out a candle and clear his throat, and he was as linguistically hobbled when he wrote as when he spoke. Most of his handicaps centered around grammar itself. He omitted endings like -ed and -s and grammatical function words like or, be , and the , despite their high frequency in the language. When reading aloud, he skipped over the function words, though he successfully read content words like bee and oar that had the same sounds. He named objects and recognized their names extremely well. He understood questions when their gist could be deduced from their content words, such as “Does a stone float on water?” or “Do you use a hammer for cutting?,” but not one that requires grammatical analysis, like “The lion was killed by the tiger; which one is dead?”
    Despite Mr. Ford’s grammatical impairment, he was clearly in command of his other faculties. Gardner notes: “He was alert, attentive, and fully aware of where he was and why he was there. Intellectual functions not closely tied to language, such as knowledge of right and left, ability to draw with the left (unpracticed) hand, to calculate, read maps, set clocks, make constructions, or carry out commands, were all preserved. His Intelligence Quotient in nonverbal areas was in the high average range.” Indeed, the dialogue shows that Mr. Ford, like many Broca’s aphasies, showed an acute understanding of his handicap.
    Injuries in adulthood are not the only ways that the circuitry underlying language can be compromised. A few otherwise healthy children just fail to develop language on schedule. When they do begin to talk, they have difficulty articulating words, and though their articulation improves with age, the victims persist in a vareity of grammatical errors, often into adulthood. When obvious nonlinguistic causes are ruled out—cognitive disorders like retardation, perceptual disorders like deafness, and social disorders like autism—the children are given the accurate but not terribly helpful diagnostic label Specific Language Impairment (SLI).
    Language therapists, who are often called upon to treat several members in a family, have long been under the impression that SLI is hereditary. Recent statistical studies show that the impression may be correct. SLI runs in families, and if one member of a set of identical twins has it, the odds are very high that the other will, too. Particularly dramatic evidence comes from one British family, the K’s, recently studied by the linguist Myrna Gopnik and several geneticists. The grandmother of the family is language-impaired. She has five adult children. One daughter is linguistically normal, as are this daughter’s children. The other four adults, like the grandmother, are impaired. Together these four had twenty-three children; of them, eleven were