Biolinguistic

Eric H. Lenneberg (1921-1975)

While these volumes were in the final stages of preparation, Eric Lenneberg died suddenly in White Plains, N.Y., on May 31, 1975. He was a man of boundless intellectual curiosity whose theoretical and integrative skills were without parallel in the study of language, brain, and behaviour. Although he is most widely known for his pioneering work on the biological foundations of human language, his ultimate concern was the study of the mind and brain, the problem he was working on just prior to his death. He was the first to propose, in the late fifties, that the human capacity for language can be explained only on the basis of biological properties of man’s brain and vocal tract, a point of view that has since been widely accepted and the elaborated upon. His experiments and views were summarized in the groundbreaking book, Biological Foundations of Language, published in 1967.

            Eric Lenneberg was born in Germany on September 19, 1921 and lived there for the first twelve years of his life. In 1993 he emigrated with his parents to Brazil. Seeking broader educational experience, he came to the United State in 1945. After one year’s service in the United States Amy he entered the University of Chicago in 1947, receiving a B. A. in 1949 and an M. A. degree in linguistics in 1951. He obtained his Ph. D. from Harvard University in 1955 in both psychology and linguistics, and subsequently accepted a post-doctoral fellowship in medical sciences at Harvard Medical School with further specialization in neurology and children’s development disorders.

            From 1959 to 1967 he held faculty positions at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology while conducting basic research on language development in deflective children at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston. From 1967 10 1968 he was Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology at Cornell University, which he held to his death. He was the recipient of numerous scholarship, fellowship, and academic honors, including Russell Sage and Guggenheim fellowship and a National Institute of Health Career Award. He was married twice and had two children by his first wife.

            Eric Lenneberg, because of his meticulous preparation in several disciplines, was able to bring to the study of language development a new perspective. He brought together the necessary development biological evidence in support of his hypothesis that language is a central, maturationally defined mental function which is relatively independent of learning, that “language is the manifestation of species-specific cognitive propensities.” This has never been particularly popular thesis for an empirical psychology, and the recent growth of interest in language pathology, including speech defects, mental retardation, dyslexia, aphasia, and most importantly, deafness, demonstrates the indirect but lasting influence of his work. His application of the biological concept of critical or sensitive periods to the study of language remains a unique and powerful contribution to developmental psycholinguistics.

            More fundamentally, Eric Lenneberg’s conception of human behaviour was different from that held by most research psychologists. Though sometimes called a “nativist”, he believed the continuing debate over innate versus environmental factors in human behaviour was irrelevant. Behavior for him was “but the outward manifestation of physiological and anatomical interactions under the impact of environmental stimulation.” This is a point of view more congenial to biology than psychology, but one certainly destined to become increasingly important in the study of human behaviour. His conception of the brain was that of a highly integrated organ constantly changing over time according to certain epigenetic trajectories. Therefore, information-processing or man-machine models of cognitive functioning were of limited value to him because they ignored the fourth dimension of time. He believed that man’s functional activity cannot be separated from structural changes in the human brain.

            For those of us who knew him, his unique preparation and the creative nature of his intellect made him an extraordinary colleague and teacher. We all gained immeasurably from contact with this courageous and profound thinker. It is to his memory that this volume is dedicated.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Eric R. Brown

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         New York University         

For further information on Eric H. Lenneberg's life, bibliography and articles, please refer to http://www.ling.fju.edu.tw/biolinguistic/data/people/eric.htm

Reference:

E. H. Lenneberg and E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Foundations of language Development: A Multidisciplinary Approach. New York and Paris: Academic Press and Unesco Press.