This chapter consists of a transcription of a fictitious forum discussion in which a number of fictitious scholars participated, including some very surprising participants. The wide-ranging discussion covers the topics discussed throughout this book, and the chapter ends with the conclusion that the nature–nurture debate is still a vibrant one in which we are seeking to understand the interplay between the nurturing experience and the role of nature, whether in the form of an innate biological endowment or in the form of natural factors that go beyond the realm of the human mind.

In this introductory chapter, I will outline what this book is about and aims to achieve, which is to continue what I started in a prequel book, A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (ML). Both books share the same central theme, namely the so-called Innateness Hypothesis for language, which is the conjecture proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky many decades ago that children acquire language guided by an innate, genetically based mental system that is specifically dedicated to this task. Both ML and this book critically examine the arguments that have been used, or could be used, to support this idea. Where ML considered arguments coming from linguistics proper, the present book delves into arguments from neighboring fields that overlap with linguistics in various ways, including cognitive science and neurolinguistics. The chapter concludes with a review of the linguistic arguments in support of Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis that formed the focus of ML.

Most linguists regard writing as an uninteresting and somewhat artificial add-on to spoken language. However, the availability of the written form influences language structure in profound ways at both the individual level (mental grammar) and the social level (language as a conventional system). The lexical and grammatical differences between spoken and written language are partly attributable to different contexts of use and partly to the fact that the written form provides a ‘processing crutch’ which enables speakers to produce more complex structures than they would otherwise be able to produce; structures which are initially learned with the aid of writing may then find their way into the speech of highly literate speakers. In the long run, the cumulative effects of these individual changes lead to changes at the level of the community language. Thus, languages with a long tradition of literacy, such as English, differ in substantial ways from oral languages.