Greenfield on language, tools, and brain

Abstract

Greenfield (1991t) fails in an attempt to defend her own original synthesis of cognitivist and nativist accounts of language development. The proposed synchronous stages of object and phoneme combination are not supported by the empirical data she presents. The functional specification of hypothetical neural circuits is almost entirely speculative. Nor is it likely that new data could save her model, since it is formulated in a simplistic information processing framework that is now of little more than historical interest.