Oxford university press how the br ain evolved language

teratos for “monster,” teratology is the clinical term 
for the study of birth defects. Testosterone is not clinically recognized as a teratogen. 
3.  The association between influenza and schizophrenia, though weak and poorly 
understood, has been corroborated, and a further association has been found between 
second-trimester influenza and adult unipolar depressive disorder (Machon et al. 
1997). 
4.  As my discussion should make clear and as Pinker (1994) explains at some 
length, genes do not have simple, unitary effects. Rather, they exert effects in combi­
nation with other genes, so there are probably hundreds of genes which could lay fair 
claim to being “grammar genes.” 
5.  Many researchers have hypothesized that perceptual saliency is a factor in learn­
ing inflectional morphology (e.g., Brown 1973; Clahsen 1989). 
6.  Bound, syllabic inflectional morphemes like -ing present an intermediate case 
between syllabic forms like of and nonsyllabic forms like -s. Common instances of such 
inflections (e.g., go/going) may be learned and performed “on the downbeat” as if they 
were uninflected irregular forms (cf. throw/threw or go/gonna). Even dysphasics may 
not exhibit difficulties with these forms in normal conversation. On wug tests, how­
ever, the nonsense forms cannot be previously learned, and here the dysphasics’ defi­
cit becomes especially apparent. 
7.  Dyslexia is not well understood, and the classification probably includes sev­
eral subtypes of different etiology. The historically dominant view, presented by 
Vellutino (1987), was that dyslexia is a higher cognitive disorder. Dyslexia is four to 
ten times more common in boys than girls, and there is reason to associate this with 
Geschwind’s finding of lesser cerebral asymmetry in boys. Such a subtype would not 
be inconsistent with adaptive grammar. However, as techniques for the measurement 
of fine eye movement have improved, there have been increasing reports of subtle 

NOTES  TO  PAGES 
178–190 
•  201 
fine motor disorders among dyslexics, although overshoots and “cerebellar braking 
problems” as described in the text are not always found. Raymond et al. (1988) found 
a positive correlation between cerebellar subtle dysfunction, dyslexia, and gaze in­
stability, and Biscaldi et al. (1994) even reported a subtype characterized by saccadic 
undershoot. See Aral et al. 1994 for a recent model of eye saccades involving the 
cerebellum. 
8.  Relatively few chemicals pass from the blood into the brain or from the brain 
into the blood. This fact is called the blood-brain barrier. 
9.  The collocation of “professors and brainwashers” is intended to alert the reader 
to the fact that this is very much a two-edged sword, as discussed further below. 
10.  Myelination is another often-postulated neurological cause of a critical pe­
riod for language (Long 1990). Adaptive grammar does not preclude a causal rela­
tionship between myelination (e.g, of the arcuate fasciculus) and language learning, 
but like lateralization, myelination is not species-specific, let alone language-specific, 
and it seems mostly to occur before the child begins to learn language. 
11.  See Deshmukh and Johnson 1997 for a recent study elaborating this distinc­
tion between neural cell death and apoptosis. 
12.  One should not conclude that a paralyzed child who cannot move her hand 
cannot develop cognition (although in such cases one should not be surprised to find 
aspects of cognition developing more slowly, either). The point is that proprioceptive 
feedback, of various origins, can form a “circular reaction,” which can be learned and 
remembered at long-term memory traces for later, volitional playback. 
13.  Long vocalizations like mamamamamamama probably do not have a specific 
meaning associated with them. They may be more words in the mind of the mommy 
than in the intentions of the baby. And, of course, any one child’s first word could 
also be bye-bye or No!—or the name of the family dog. But the early, if not absolutely 
first, occurrence of /mama/ is still far, far too widespread a phenomenon to be coin­
cidental. 
14.  I thank Elaine Shea for pointing this out to me. 
15.  In English, inflectional -s and -ed are usually not syllabic, so a technical account 
of the learning of inflectional and derivational morphology as an offbeat process must 
appeal to other child language morphophonemic processes like reduplication and 
diminutive affixation as well. 
16.  Braine (1971) introduced the notion of “pivot grammar” to describe the 
child’s early two-word utterances. Subsequent researchers were unable to generalize 
the notion to longer utterances, but it anticipated adaptive grammar’s implication of 
rhythmic dipoles in the syntactic organization of language. 
17.  Even in Chinese, whose writing system is often thought to bear little or no 
overt relationship to the spoken language, we find that Chinese readers process Chi­
nese characters primarily as sound (Chu-Chang and Loritz 1977). 

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