The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

effects were of that early – say year and a half – of experience. [It is true that] they have never found a successful case of someone blind and deaf from birth. So a lot is obviously going on in the first year even though nothing is being exhibited. [Nevertheless,] it can be done[; language can appear in modalities other than sound and sight]. Helen Keller did it – and she was a terrific writer.
    JM: To go back to another matter we discussed last time, I asked whether canalization could be expressed in terms ofparameters and the possible channels or paths for development that they provide. I take it that canalization for language would involve not just contributions by what we might call the innate biological endowment that gives us language, but also by other, non-linguistic systems .
    NC: Waddington's point was that there must be architectural constraints and developmental constraints that are independent of the organism, and they function to channel the growth of the organism in particular directions. So, for example, if locality conditions or other efficient computation conditions contributed to the outcome of language – probably it doesn't have anything to do with language, or even humans, perhaps even biological organisms. That's the idea. I don't think that biologists doubt very much that something like that is going on. But how much is hard to determine.
    JM: But in terms of your three sets of factors . . .
    NC: That's the third factor. Thechoice of parameters is either the first [genetic] factor or the third [other constraint] factor; but the setting of them has to be the secondfactor.[C]
    JM: OK .

7 Development, master/control genes, etc.
     
    JM: Who was the person who did the interesting work on the eye and the PAX-6 gene; I forgot .
    NC: Walter Gehring.
     
    JM: Gehring in Switzerland. That kind of work might throw quite a different kind of light on the question of how a system that had Merge built into it . . .[C]
    NC: His work is extremely interesting; and basically, what he shows – I don't have any expert judgment, but it seems to be pretty well accepted – is that all visual systems (maybe even phototropic plants) seem to begin with some stochastic event that got a particular class of molecules into a cell – the rhodopsin molecules that happen to have the property that they transmit light energy in the form of chemical energy. So you have the basis for reacting to light. And after that comes a series of developments which apparently are very restrictive. There's a regulatory gene that seems to show up all over the place, and the further developments, according to his account, are highly restricted by the possibilities of inserting genes into a collection of genes, which probably has only certain physical possibilities . . .
    JM: the third factor . . .
    NC: . . . yes, the third factor, which gives you the variety of eyes. That's very suggestive; it's quite different from the traditional view.
    JM: Does it have any bearing on language?
    NC: Only that it suggests that there is another system that seems to have powerful third factor effects.
    JM: I've sometimes wondered about – well, take people working onWilliams Syndrome children. Their brains have different morphologies – they're really quite extraordinarily different. And yet they have this amazing capacity to . . .
    NC: Well, some of Eric Lenneberg'sdiscoveries are even more dramatic, like the work he did on nanocephalic dwarfs, which is really dramatic. They have almost no cortex at all, yet almost perfect language ability.
    JM: Well, it certainly throws monkey wrenches into the idea that language must be localized . . .
    NC: And it just shows how crude our understanding is. But that's not too surprising. Language is the last thing we should expect to understand, because it's the one system that – for ethical reasons – you cannot directly investigate. Every other system you can investigate in other animals. Since there