Deficit and Delay in the Development of Spoken Language

Abstract

As a species, we are more than could be predicted from an anatomical inventory of our constituent parts and the human animal displays an astonishing development of interpersonal, emotional and cognitive functions. These functions, unique though they are in the animal world, are dependent on the efficient and precisely coordinated working of their component parts. They are doubly vulnerable since they are at the mercy of the host of factors which may damage the various systems and organs of the body, and carry their own fragility as the price to be paid for their recent appearance in evolutionary time. They are tempered in the crucible of a few million years of usage at most, a small fragment of the hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate development which undergird vision, digestion and the neuromuscular processes of mobility.