Nature/Nurture: Moma's Boys -made or born that way?

[Clodfobble]

They've done fMRI scans on autistic patients who didn't learn to speak until a later age, and for many of them their "native language" paths are laid out where the "foreign language" paths would be in a person who grew up normally then took a second language in school. Basically they have no native language, and what they do know came from rote learning instead of instinct. It doesn't shed any particular light on why they missed out on the instinctive language window in the first place, but one side effect is that for those who do force through and learn to speak as a "second language," they get that same benefit native speakers have in that learning a "third language" is relatively easy after the structures have already been developed for a "second."

Case in point, my daughter still speaks English a bit like an immigrant--reverses word order, conjugates verbs incorrectly especially in future and past tense, can't come up with common words but can talk around the deficit ("the pink rectangle" if the word "book" escapes her, for example,) but she is miles ahead of the other kids in Spanish class.