THE MODULAR MIND AND SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT

The Modular Mind: Dissociations of Languages and Cognition

Linguistic Savants

There are numerous cases of intellectually handicapped individuals who despite their disabilities in certain spheres, show remarkable talents in other. There are superb musicians and artists who lack the simple abilities required to take care of themselves. Such people are referred to as savants.

Cases of Savants person:

1Case:

Laura was a young retarder woman. She lacked almost all number concepts, including basic counting principles, and could draw only at a prescool level.  

She could not add 2+2. She did not know how old she was or whether 15 is before or after 19. Nevertheless, Laura produce complex sentences with multiple phrases and embedded sentences. She used and understood passive sentences, and she was able to inflect verbs for number and person to agree with the subject of a sentence. She formed past tenses in accord with adverbs that referred to past time. She Did not know who the president of the United States was or what country she lived in.

Laura is but one of many examples of children who display well-develop grammatical abilities to associate linguistic expressions with the objects they refer to, and severe deficits in nonlinguistic expressions with the objects they refer to, and severe deficits in nonlinguistic cognition.

2 Case:

Christopher. He lives in an institution because he is unable to take care of himself. The tasks of buttoning a shirt, cutting his fingernails, or vacuuming the carpet are too dificult for him. However, his linguistic competence is as rich and as sophisticated as that of any native speaker. When give written texts in some fifteen to twenty languages,He translated them quickly, with few errors, into English. He can translate quickly: Germanic languages such as  Danish, Dutch, and German; Romance languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as Polish, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Turkish, and Welsh. Christopher loves to study and learn languages. Little else is of interest to him. His situation strongly suggests that his linguistic ability is independent of his general intellectual ability.  

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Specific Language Impairment 

People like Laura and Christopher have normal or superior linguistic skills though their abilities in other areas very limited. There are individuals who show the opposite profile: among these are children with Specific Language Impairment The development of language, They show no other cognitive deficits, they are not autistic or retarder, and they have no perceptual problem. Only their linguistic ability is affected, and often only specific aspects of grammar are impaired.

Children with SLI have problems with the use of function words such as articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. They also have difficulties with inflectional suffixes on nouns and verbs such as markets of plurality or tense