Linguistic modularity? A case study of a ‘Savant’ linguist

Abstract

We provide a preliminary report on a young man who is institutionalised because he is unable to look after himself, but who has a remarkable talent for acquiring and using foreign languages. After documenting the breadth of his expertise across some sixteen languages, we investigate his command of his native language, English, and the extent to which his linguistic competence is integrated into his general cognitive ability, and we briefly discuss the implications of these results for Fodor's modularity hypothesis. The results of the experiments devised to test these aspects of his linguistic and inferential abilities then provide the basis for a more detailed analysis of his command of one specific language, Modern Greek. We concentrate on properties associated with the pro-drop parameter, in particular that-t effects and the possibility of post-verbal subjects, contrasting his performance in Greek, a pro-drop language, with English, a non-pro-drop language. The pattern of results obtained indicate that he is not acquiring a ‘first’ language several times over, but it remains for future investigation to determine how characteristic of normal second-language learners his acquisition is. We also tentatively interpret his performance in Greek as evidence in favour of the claim that the phenomena associated with the pro-drop parameter do constitute a natural class, and specifically provide support for Rizzi's revision of the parameter in terms of relativised minimality. We emphasize that these results are preliminary and hope to refine and extend our analyses in subsequent contributions.