Those are hands with words on them. I’m putting it here because this is is a post about !!!_LA_NG_UA_GE!!! 

I am very interested in this man’s work, specifically, what he calls “poverty of the stimulus”, an idea about language acquisition in childhood.

Basically, the idea of poverty of the stimulus is based on Noam Chomsky’s hypothesis that every human being has an innate capacity for spoken language. This stands in contradistinction to the notion that humans develop language as a result of mimicking behavior. A great deal of Chomsky’s research is toward discovering what all languages have in common, syntactically speaking. The structural foundations of language are what he seeks to uncover.Chomsky believes that language is developed in the absence of positive stimuli.

Wikipedia explains this as such:

There are patterns in all natural languages (i.e. human languages) that cannot be learned by children using positive evidence alone. Positive evidence is the set of grammatical sentences the language learner has access to, that is, by observing the speech of others. Negative evidence, on the other hand, is the evidence available to the language learner about what is not grammatical. For instance, when a parent corrects a child’s speech, the child acquires negative evidence.Children are only ever presented with positive evidence for these particular patterns. For example, they only hear others speaking using sentences that are “right”, not those that are “wrong”.

This argument has come under scrutiny by many philosophers of mind. It is something that interests me with specific regard to autism. My twin brother is autistic; he was diagnosed at the age of two after my parents noticed that he wasn’t developing language normally. He cannot speak or communicate using words at all. Having spent, of course, a great deal of time around him growing up, I’ve observed him and thought pretty hard about what could be the cause for such a disorder. I’m also interested by the accelerating rates of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses. What gives?

One idea I have about it is based on Chomsky’s research. I think that it’s possible that overexposure to conflicting linguistic stimuli confuses the autism-predisposed brain and forces the part that develops normal grammars and speaking rhythms to shut down. In a society that is almost over-filled with linguistic and symbolic stimuli - think of how many billboards with words on them a newborn baby might absorb on its trip home from the hospital, how many different ways of speaking he or she might overhear just in a hospital waiting room - this seems to make sense. I know nothing about rates of autism in lesser-developed countries, and I’m certainly not considering this a key to unlock the great mystery that is language development disorders. It’s just something I ponder quite often. I’d say more, but homework is killing me alive!