Recent Challenges.


A context for the future investigation of the relationship between language and cognition is an existing fundamental dispute about the nature of the language faculty. At one extreme is the strong Chomskyan view that language is an “organ,” innately specified, and both computationally and neurologically divorced from other aspects of cognition. Other scholars argue that the experience of the child acquiring language plays a stronger role in determining language form. Jackendoff in 1997 develops a theory according to which language is the outcome of a combination of factors, some specific to language (and possibly genetically specified), and others that tap more general concepts and knowledge about the world. We now turn to certain outstanding questions about sign language that bear on this controversy. When they are seriously addressed, we believe the answers will lead us to a far deeper understanding of the language capacity than would have been possible without sign language research.


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