The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (Outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit and plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this paper, i.e., not to attack innateness but to clarify what

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Language is a unique hallmark of the human species. Although many species can communicate in limited ways about things that are physically present, only humans can construct a full narrative characterization of events occurring outside of the here and now. Humans are also unique in their ability to fashion tools such as arrow points, axes, traps, and clothing. By using language to control the social coordination of tool making, humans have produced a material society that has achieved domination over all the creatures of our world and often over Nature herself. The religions of the world have interpreted our unique linguistic endowment as a Special Gift bestowed directly by the Creator. Scientists have also been influenced by this view of language, often attributing the emergence of this remarkable species-specific ability to some single, pivotal salutatory event in human evolution. I will refer to this sudden evolutionary jump into true human language as linguistic saltation. Linguistic saltationists (Bickerton, 1990; Chomsky, 1975; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002) tend to see language as a very recent evolutionary event. They can note that the divergence of our hominid ancestors from the Great Apes occurred over 6 million years

Both language and music consist of sequences that are structured according to syntactic regularities. We used two specific event-related brain potential (ERP) components to investigate music-syntactic processing in children: the ERAN (Early Right Anterior Negativity) and the N5. The neural resources underlying these processes have been posited to overlap with those involved in the processing of linguistic syntax. Thus, we expected children with specific language impairment (SLI, which is characterized by deficient processing of linguistic syntax) to demonstrate difficulties with music-syntactic processing. Such difficulties were indeed observed in the neural correlates of music-syntactic processing: neither an ERAN nor an N5 was elicited in children with SLI, whereas both components were evoked in age-matched control children with typical language development. Moreover, the amplitudes of ERAN and N5 were correlated with subtests of a language development test. These data provide evidence for a strong interrelation between the language and the music processing system, thereby setting the ground for possible effects of musical training in SLI therapy.

The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be

Cannizzaro for her assistance in data collection, to the parents, children and teachers for their cooperation, and to Gino Galli and Robert Buffington for technical support. Please address all correspondence to Simonetta D'Amico, Università degli Studi

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder characterised by morpho-syntactic errors in the absence of neurological trauma, cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, or motor-articulatory disorders. Among the hypotheses that have argued for SLI as an impairment at the linguistic level, rather than at the cognitive or perceptual level, there is a debate as to whether SLI is primarily an impairment in the marking of tense features, agreement features, or both. The current study uses data from spontaneous speech of a Greek SLI child to examine whether, in a language with rich agreement and tense marking, we can find evidence supporting one of these competing hypotheses. The subject was a monolingual Greek speaker aged 5;5, within the normal range oflQ, independently diagnosed as SLI, and receiving language therapy at the time of data collection. We investigated the subject's use of verb forms for both accuracy in obligatory contexts and accuracy of forms. We present the findings for the subject's performance and focus on error analyses to argue that this SLI subject is impaired in subject-verb agreement marking, whereas tense marking is unimpaired. These results, we argue, support the view that SLI selectively affects the morpho-syntactic features involved in agreement operations.

This study examines the system of case marking in two groups of German-speaking children, five children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and five typically-developing (TD) children matched to the SLI children on a general measure of language development. The data from both groups demonstrate high accuracy scores for structural case marking and overapplications of structural cases to instances that require lexical case marking in the adult language. These results, we argue, provide evidence for the sensitivity of both TD and SLI children for abstract, structure-based regularities, and is incompatible with accounts of SLI that posit broad syntactic deficits for these children.

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) were for many years treated as distinct disorders but are now often regarded as different manifestations of the same underlying problem, differing only in severity or developmental stage. The merging of these categories has been motivated by the reconceptualization of dyslexia as a language disorder in which phonological processing is deficient. The authors argue that this focus underestimates the independent influence of semantic and syntactic deficits, which are widespread in SLI and which affect reading comprehension and impair attainment of fluent reading in adolescence. The authors suggest that 2 dimensions of impairment are needed to conceptualize the relationship between these disorders and to capture phenotypic features that are important for identifying neurobiologically and etiologically coherent subgroups. Specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia (also known as specific reading disability; SRD) are common developmental disorders that have a serious impact on a child’s educational and psychosocial outcome. SLI affects around 3%– 10 % of children (Tomblin et al., 1997) and is diagnosed when oral language lags behind other areas of development for no apparent

Double dissociations play an important role in neuropsychology, but they are often identified through subjective estimates of ‘‘high’ ’ versus ‘‘low’ ’ performance, without considering the probability that such an outcome might have occurred by chance. To determine whether two measures ‘‘come apart’ ’ in an interesting way in brain-damaged patients, it is important to know the degree to which variance in one measure can be predicted by variance in the other. This study introduces a statistical procedure to determine the probability of a double dissociation when the correlation between measures is taken into account. Different quantitative definitions of dissociations were compared in two large samples of neurological patients, and applied to four pairs of measures (two for language, two for hemispatial neglect) with different degrees of intercorrelation (ranging from þ.21 to þ.84). If the correlation between measures is not taken into account, large numbers of dissociated cases may be missed, especially for measures that are highly correlated. There are also qualitative differences between methods in the identity of those individuals who meet each definition. Early in the 19th century, investigators interested in the relations between brain and mental faculties became involved in the search for