Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T12:35:23.860Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dis-integrating Perspectives of Language Acquisition

A Response to Eubank and Gregg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Bob Jacobs
Bob Jacobs
Affiliation:
The Colorado College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I wish to warn young men against the invincible attraction of theories which simplify and unify seductively. Ruled by the [reticularist] theory, we who were active in histology then saw networks everywhere [italics added].… This [reticularist theory] was admirably convenient, since it did away with all need for the analytical effort involved in determining in each case the course through the gray matter followed by the nervous impulse. It has rightly been said that the reticular hypothesis, by dint of pretending to explain everything easily and simply, explains absolutely nothing; and, what is more serious, it hinders and almost makes superfluous future inquiries regarding the intimate organization of the centers [italics added]. (Ramóny Cajal, 1989, pp. 303–337)

Type
Responses
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 65 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, K. C., Brown, C. P., & Tallal, P. (1993). Developmental language disorders: Evidence for a basic processing deficit. Current Science, 6, 98–106.Google ScholarPubMed
Artola, A., & Singer, W. (1987). Long-term potentiation and NMDA receptors in rat visual cortex. Nature, 330, 649–652.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E. (1994). Modularity, domain specificity and the development of language. Discussions in Neuroscience, 10, 136–149.Google Scholar
Bates, E., & Marchman, V. A. (1988). What is and is not universal in language acquisition. In Plum, F. (Ed.), Language, communication, and the brain (pp. 19–38). New York: Raven Press.Google Scholar
Bliss, T. V. P., & Gardner-Medwin, A. R. (1973). Long-lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the unanesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path. Journal of Physiology, 232, 357–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bohannon, J. N. III, & Stanowicz, L. (1988). The issue of negative evidence: Adult responses to children's language errors. Developmental Psychology, 24, 684–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Catalán-Ahumada, M., Deggouj, N., Volder, A. D., Melin, J., Michel, C., & Veraart, C. (1993). High metabolic activity demonstrated by positron emission tomography in human auditory cortex in case of deafness of early onset. Brain Research, 623, 287–292.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, N. (1984). Modular approaches to the study of the mind. San Diego: San Diego State University Press.Google Scholar
Curtiss, S. (1977). Genie: A psycholinguistic study of a modern-day “wild child.” New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Eichenbaum, H., & Cohen, N. J. (1988). Representation in the hippocampus: What do hippocampal neurons encode? Trends in Neuroscience, 11, 244–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eubank, L., & Gregg, K. R. (1995). “Et in amygdala ego”?: UG, (S)LA, and neurobiology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17, 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A. (1991). Prosody in speech to children: Prelinguistic and linguistic functions. In Vasta, R. (Ed.), Annals of child development (Vol. 8, pp. 43–80). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.Google Scholar
Fletcher, P. (1990). Speech and language defects. Nature, 346, 226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990a). Dysphasia in an extended family. Nature, 344, 715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, M.(1990b). Feature blindness. Language Acquisition, 1, 139–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenough, W. T., & Chang, F.-L. F. (1985). Synaptic structural correlates of information storage in mammalian nervous systems. In Cotman, C. W. (Ed.), Synaptic plasticity (pp. 335–372). New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Gregg, K. R. (1993). Taking explanations seriously; or, let a couple of flowers bloom. Applied Linguistics, 14, 276–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, B. (1988). Neurobiological differentiation of primary and secondary language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 10, 303–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, B. (1991). A quantitative dendritic analysis of Wernicke's area. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Jacobs, B., & Schumann, J. (1992). Language acquisition and the neurosciences: Towards a more integrative perspective. Applied Linguistics, 13, 282–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, W. M., Merzenich, M. M., & Recanzone, G. (1990). Neocortical representational dynamics in adult primates: Implications for neuropsychology. Neuropsychologia, 28, 573–584.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, T. A., & Schallert, T. (1992). Overgrowth and pruning of dendrites in adult rats recovering from neocortical damage. Brain Research, 581, 156–160.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. J. (1993). Infant's preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kalil, R. E. (1989). Synapse formation in the developing brain. Scientific American, 261, 76–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karni, A., & Sagi, D. (1993). The time course of learning a visual skill. Nature, 365, 250–252.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kirkwood, A., Dudek, S. M., Gold, J. T., Aizenman, C. D., & Bear, M. F. (1993). Common forms of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and neocortex in vitro. Science, 260, 1518–1521.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krmpotic-Nemanic, J., Kostovic, I., Bogdanovic, N., Fucic, A., & Judas, M. (1988). Cytoarchitectonic parameters of developmental capacity of the human associative auditory cortex during postnatal life. Acta Otolaryngology, 105, 463–466.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewine, J. D., Astur, R. S., Davis, L. E., Knight, J. E., Maclin, E. L., & Orrison, W. W. (1994). Cortical organization in adulthood is modified by neonatal infarct: A case study. Radiology, 190, 93–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macphail, E. M. (1993). The neuroscience of animal intelligence: From the seahare to the seahorse. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Metin, C., & Frost, D. O. (1986). Visual responses of neurons in somatosensory cortex of hamsters with experimentally induced retinal projections to somatosensory thalamus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 81, 357–361.Google Scholar
Mills, D. L., Coffey-Corina, S. A., & Neville, H. J. (1993). Language acquisition and cerebral specialization in 20-month-old infants. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 317–334.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mulkey, R. M., Herron, C. E., & Malenka, R. C. (1993). An essential role for protein phosphatases in hippocampal long-term depression. Science, 261, 1051–1055.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neville, H. J. (1990). Intermodal competition and compensation in development: Evidence from studies of the visual system in congenially deaf adults. In Diamond, A. (Ed.), The development and neural bases of higher cognitive functions (pp. 71–87). New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Neville, H. J., Mills, D. L., & Lawson, D. S. (1992). Fractionating language: Different neural subsystems with different sensitive periods. Cerebral Cortex, 2, 244–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neville, H. J., Nicol, J., Barss, A., Forster, K., & Garrett, M. (1991). Syntactically based sentence processing classes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 151–165.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Keefe, J., & Nadel, L. (1978). The hippocampus as a cognitive map. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pascual-Leone, A., & Torres, F. (1993). Plasticity of the sensorimotor cortex representation of the reading finger in Braille readers. Brain, 116, 39–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Racine, R. J., Milgram, N. W., & Hafner, S. (1983). Long-term potentiation phenomena in the rat limbic forebrain. Brain Research, 260, 217–231.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ramón, y Cajal S. (1902). Studien über die Hirnrinde des Menschen, Heft 3. Leipzig: J. A. Barth.Google Scholar
Ramón, y Cajal S. (1989). Recollections of my life (Craigie, E. H. & Cano, J., Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1901–1917)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rauschecker, J. P., & Korte, M. (1993). Auditory compensation for early blindness in cat cerebral cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 4538–4548.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ridgeway, S. H. (1990). The central nervous system of the bottlenose dolphin. In Leatherwood, S. & Reeves, R. R. (Eds.), The bottlenose dolphin (pp. 69–97). New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schumann, J. H. (1993). Some problems with falsification: An illustration from SLA research. Applied Linguistics, 14, 295–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seldon, H. L. (1985). The anatomy of speech perception: Human auditory cortex. In Peters, A. & Jones, E. G. (Eds.), Cerebral cortex (Vol. 4, pp. 273–327). New York: Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Seress, L., & Mrzljak, L. (1992). Postnatal development of mossy cells in the human dentate gyrus: A light microscopic Golgi study. Hippocampus, 2, 127–142.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sur, M., Garraghty, P. E., & Roe, A. W. (1988). Experimentally induced visual projections into auditory thalamus and cortex. Science, 242, 1437–1441.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tallal, P., Miller, S., & Fitch, R. H. (1993). Neurobiological basis of speech: A case for the preeminence of temporal processing. In Tallal, P., Galaburda, A. M., Uinas, R., & von Euler, C. (Eds.), Temporal information processing in the central nervous system: Special reference to dyslexia and dysphasia (Vol. 682, pp. 27–47). New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Vargha-Khadem, F., & Passingham, R. (1990). Speech and language defects. Nature, 346, 226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K., Alcock, K., Fletcher, P., & Passingham, R. (1995). Praxic and nonverbal cognitive deficits in a large family with a genetically transmitted speech and language disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 92, 930–933.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiller, C., Chollet, F., Friston, K. J., Wise, R. J. S., & Frackowiak, R. S. J. (1992). Functional reorganization of the brain in recovery from striatocapsula infarction in man. Annals of Neurology, 31, 463–472.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wolff, A. B., & Thatcher, R. W. (1990). Cortical reorganization in deaf children. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 12, 209–221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed