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Lumifer comments on Academic Cliques - Less Wrong
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Also a follow-up question: I remember reading that children who do not learn any language by the age of 7-9 forever lose the capability to acquire a language (examples were children brought up by animals and maybe a couple of cases of child abuse). Is that actually true?
This is a difficult issue. There are very few documented instances of feral children and it is hard to isolate their language deficiency from their other problems.
What we do have a lot of documentation on is children with various types of intellectual disabilities. My four-year old daughter is autistic and has an IQ of 50. Her language is around the level of a 24 month old (though possibly with a bigger vocabulary and worse grammar). Does she have a deficient language module? That doesn't really seem like a great explanation for anything. Her mental deficiencies are much broader than that. If there were a lot of children with deficient language but otherwise normal development that would lend some support to a language module model. But this isn't really the case. If your language is borked that usually means that other things are borked too.
Another thing about my daughter: She's made me realize how smart humans are. A retarded 4 year old is still really really smart compared to other species. My daughter certainly has far more sophisticated language than this guy did. I bet she could beat a chimp in other cognitive tasks as well.
Mostly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis