[lbo-talk] a bitch needs to fan herself

[Arash]

Actually mastering a language implies very little about someone's other
abilities and skills.  An adult SLI sufferer, one of those studied in the
research leading to the famous discovery of the FOXP2 gene's involvement
in language, couldn't pass a simple language fluency assessment like the
wug-test, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wug_Test, something most children
have mastered by age four or five, but he was an exceptional math student.

 And there are language savants who can be fluent in several languages yet
having trouble with simple tasks with dressing themselves.  More to the
point, the process of acquiring language, where the complexity of grammar
seems to be intuited in a highly implicit way and usually cannot be fully
mastered after childhood, doesn't seem at like the kind of learning
involved in job training.

Woj wrote:

Most people are not very far
apart in their abilities and skills - as evidenced by
the fact that all but the mentally retarded can fully
master the most complex and comprehensive system ever
created by humans - the language.