¿Hasta qué punto son específicos los trastornos específicos del lenguaje? Implicaciones para una caracterización biológica de la facultad lingüística humana

To what point are specific the specific language impairments? Some biological characterization of the human linguistic faculty An increasing corpus of clinical, neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and genetic evidences seems to put into question the idiosyncratic nature of the so-called specific language impairments. Methodological caveats could be in part responsible for some of the problems that arise when trying to precisely characterize and distinctively define this kind of cognitive disorders. However, those evidences also seem to demand a thorough re-examination of the conventional description of how the “language organ” is structured, and how it develops and works. A main conclusion here will be that the “language organ” emerges during ontogeny as a result of an innate programme (genetically encoded to some extent), which, nevertheless, is always conditioned by the molecular and the ontogenetic background of the organism, and also by the environment in which the subject lives. Inside this “organ” different neuronal structures jointly work in order to properly process linguistic stimuli, though each of these components are simultaneously able to compute different types of inputs. Key words: Aphasia, comorbidity, dyslexia, environment, genetic programme, language, linguistic ontogeny, modularity, molecular biology, SLI.