What conception of mental architecture can survive the
evidence of neuroplasticity and neural reuse in the human brain?
In particular, what sorts of modules are compatible with this
evidence? I aim to show how developmental and adult
neuroplasticity, as well as evidence of pervasive neural reuse,
forces us to revise the standard conception of modularity and
spells the end of a hardwired and dedicated language module. I
argue from principles of both neural reuse and neural redundancy
that language is facilitated by a composite of modules (or
module-like entities), few if any of which are likely to be
linguistically special, and that neuroplasticity provides
evidence that (in key respects and to an appreciable extent) few
if any of them ought to be considered developmentally robust,
though their development does seem to be constrained by features
intrinsic to particular regions of cortex (manifesting as
domain-specific predispositions or acquisition biases). In the
course of doing so I articulate a schematically and
neurobiologically precise framework for understanding modules and
their supramodular interactions
