Language and the human brain are, in some ways, individual puzzles that enjoy a fascinating symbiosis. Students in Dr. Andrey Vyshedskiy’s Metropolitan College class, Neuroscience of Human Cognition: Imagination, Language, and Consciousness (MET BI 366), come to understand how the brain evolved to function as it does, and how our languages sprung forth from that. It’s a subject that Dr. Vyshedskiy has been studying for decades—and now he has published new research that stands to challenge the preexisting model for assessing language development.
After completing a study of 31,845 individuals with language impairments, Dr. Vyshedskiy’s new work proposes that instead of a linear trajectory, where children acquire one grammatical rule at a time (which is what is commonly believed today), humans over time evolved to three different language comprehension phenotypes: syntactic language, modifier language, and command language.
The results of this study have far-reaching implications—from the debate on whether neanderthals could talk (Dr. Vyshedskiy’s answer: yes), to improving language assessments and therapy for children.
Read more in Live Science and at MedicalResearch.com.