What Would Lenneberg Think? Biolinguistics in the Third Millennium

Biolinguistics, construed broadly as the study of human language from multiple biological viewpoints, was first placed on a solid modern foundation by Eric Lenneberg’s impressive Biological Foundations of Language in 1967. Lenneberg conceived of our capacity to acquire language as a species-typical aspect of human cognition—a conception so widespread today that it is difficult to realize how radical it seemed to many at the time. Although Lenneberg argued that our language capacity has some species-typical genetic and neural components, he clearly recognized that it has a huge learned, culture-specific component as well. Lenneberg had thus already leap-frogged the unproductive “nature versus nurture” dichotomy that has bedevilled so many debates about language since that time. He also recognized that human language differs in important ways from animal communication, and raised the question of whether the roots of language are best sought in cognition or communication—another prominent preoccupation in modern debates. In short, although he apparently did not adopt the term “biolinguistics” himself, Eric Lenneberg can rightly be seen as an important founding father of contemporary biolinguistics. This makes a celebration in this journal, fifty years later, of his magnum opus highly appropriate. In this essay, I will first briefly discuss a few of Lenneberg’s many insights that I think bear repeating today. Then, I turn to a discussion of modern empirical developments in biolinguistics that I think Lenneberg would find welcome, and in many cases surprising, were he alive today. I will thus focus less on the aspects of Lenneberg’s thought that have stood the test of time well, and are still essentially correct today (which covers many of them) and more on aspects where modern data invite a reconsideration of some of his ideas. These come from three general areas: comparative investigations, modern neuroscience and especially molecular genetics. My goal is to provide a concise overview of those developments that I believe, were Lenneberg to appear for a conversation about biolinguistics today, he