But I don’t think it follows that we have a specialized language module—we may be using some more generic part of our cognitive capacity. I’m not sure if we really have the data to settle this yet.
There was an autistic savant, Chris, whose skill was in learning languages, and who was unable to learn a fake language put together by researchers that used easy but non-attested types of rules (eg. reversing the whole sentence to form a question). What do you make of it?
I’ve always thought it was fairly weak evidence in the sense that autistic people often have all kinds of other things potentially going on with them, that it’s a sample size of 1, and so on.
There was an autistic savant, Chris, whose skill was in learning languages, and who was unable to learn a fake language put together by researchers that used easy but non-attested types of rules (eg. reversing the whole sentence to form a question). What do you make of it?
I’ve always thought it was fairly weak evidence in the sense that autistic people often have all kinds of other things potentially going on with them, that it’s a sample size of 1, and so on.