Swammerdam Lecture 25.11.

Abstract.
Charles Darwin boosted the study of language acquisition in 1877 by publishing the diary he had kept of his son William’s first speech between 1839 and 1841. Three years earlier, Carl Wernicke had brilliantly published his neuropsychological diagrams of the language network in the brain. Such diagram making soon became an industry. Physiologist William Preyer absorbed both developments, the diary approach to early language acquisition and neuropsychological diagram making. In 1881 he published his classical Die Seele des Kindes, in which both approaches were combined in the construction of the very first neuropsychological model of language acquisition. In this lecture I will go back to the two historical roots of these developments. They are, first, the chain of discoveries about language in the brain, leading from Franz Joseph Gall too the so-called “diagram makers” and, second, the scattered pedagogical efforts to keep diaries of early cognitive development, which had been triggered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Els Borghols
Dept. of Functional Genomics
Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research (CNCR)
Graduate School Neurosciences Amsterdam Rotterdam(ONWAR)
VU/VUmc
W&N building, room A-427
De Boelelaan 1085
1081 HV Amsterdam
tel:. +31-20–598 6925
fax: +31-20–598 6926
e-mail els.borghols@cncr.vu.nl