Free The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky Page B

whether they like to say it or not. Well, the most parsimonious assumption is that that's all that happened. It's probably not that [alone]; but we have no evidence against it. So unless there's some evidence to the contrary, we sort of keep to that and see how far we can go. Well, mutations take place in an individual, not in a society, so what must have happened at some point is that that mutation took place in one person and then it would be transferred to offspring, or some offspring, at least. It was a pretty small breeding group. So it could be that if it gave a selectional advantage, they'd dominate the breeding group pretty soon, maybe in a few generations.This could all be done without any communication. It gives you the ability to think, toconstruct complex thoughts, to plan, to interpret . . . It's hard to imagine that that wouldn't yield a selectional advantage, so it could be that over some fairly short time, throughout this breeding group, that the capacity to think was wellembedded. The use of it to communicate could have come later. Furthermore, it looks peripheral: as far as we can see from studying language, it doesn't seem to affect the structure of language very much. And it does appear to be largely modality-independent. [No doubt] there are advantages to sound over sight – you can use it in the dark and it goes around corners – things like that. But it's quite possible that it's just a later development that came along, and it may not have had much effect on the structure of language.[C]
    JM: Really modality-independent? It's clearly bimodal . . .
    NC: Well, at least bimodal. But we just don't know how many modalities you can use. We don't have well-developed senses of smells, so we probably can't do much with that. You can do it with touch. I don't know if people can learn Braille as a firstlanguage. It's conceivable . . .
    No, actually, there is some evidence for this. Not a ton of it, but there have been studies – actually Carol [Chomsky's wife] was working on thisat MIT with people most of whom had had meningitis around age 1 or 2, somewhere around there – and who had lost all modalities except touch. They were blind and deaf – they could speak; they had an articulatory apparatus – but they were blind and deaf. There's a method of teaching them language by putting the hand on the face. So if you're one of those patients, you could put your hand on the face kind of like this – I think the thumb is on the vocal cords and the fingers are around the mouth – and they had an amazing capacity for language.
    This is a group at MIT that was working on sensory aids, but Carol was working on [the project] as a linguist to see how much they know. And she had to do pretty sophisticated tests on them – tag questions and things like that – to get to a point where they didn't [seem to] have the whole system [of language] in their heads. They get along fine – nobody would notice that there's a language defect. They have to have constant retraining too, though: they don't get any sensory feedback, so they lose their articulatory capacities, and then they have to be constantly retrained to do that. For example, their prize patient was a tool and die maker in Iowa somewhere. He got here by himself. He had a card which he would show people if he was lost and needed directions – he'd show [it to] them and [it would] say, “May I put my hand on your face,” explaining why. He could get around – got here all right, lived with his wife who was also blind and deaf. The only problem they had was locating each other. So they had a system of vibrators [installed] around the house that they could use to locate each other. But the point is that [he had] acapacity for language that you really had to test to find deficiencies – you wouldn't notice it in ordinaryinteraction.
    Now of course these people are like Helen Keller. [Her condition] was not from birth, and nobody really knows what the