Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 11, 1992 TAG: 9202110230
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
GRAMMAR ABILITY LINKED TO GENE
A single dominant gene controls the ability to learn grammar, said a researcher who studied a family whose members don't know to add "ed" for the past tense of verbs or "s" for plural nouns.Myrna Gopnik of Montreal's McGill University said Monday that the studies show that in all other ways the members are intellectually normal.
But, she said, "Language is a problem they solve by sheer wit."
She said people lacking the grammar gene "are worn out just by talking" because they must continually struggle with verb tense and noun plurals.
"The hardest part for them is people thinking that they are stupid," Gopnik said. "They are not. You have to think of them as people without a native language."
Gopnik reported on her research at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it was first suggested in the 1960s that there was a genetic component to learning language and that recent studies, such as that by Gopnik, supports that belief.
He said his research shows that learning words and learning to apply the rules of grammar are two different functions springing from different parts of the brain.
People with a normal grammar gene naturally learn language rules that make verbs past tense or turn nouns into plurals, Gopnik said.
People lacking the gene, however, must learn through another intellectual process how to change verbs and nouns.
"They will say `today I walk, yesterday I . . . ' and they don't know how to finish," said Gopnik. "For some reason they don't build the general rules of language" such as adding the "ed" to make walk past tense.