Language: the chicken or the egg?

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2007/10/5/lifefocus/18951336&sec=lifefocus
In one of the most intriguing articles I’ve come across so far, I found this central question being posed in the language realm: Which is more important to coherent speech, vocabulary or grammar? Before taking the same middle road and saying “both,” I thought it’d be interesting to analyze this problem from both a sociological and scientific point of view.
Being a fan of the culinary arts allowed me to understand where the author of the first article was coming from. Much like recipes, speech and conversation in general would not be possible without the basic ingredients, and in a linguist’s point of view, that would be vocabulary. However, many may also argue that you can’t form a coherent sentence without the basic grammatical knowledge of verbs, nouns, subjects, etc. This then, seems to be a great predicament. The author of the first article gives five basic arguments for why vocabulary is “far more important”
1. there’s no point in knowing grammar if you don’t have the word bank to fit into sentences
2. many linguistic segments already come in “ready-made” phrases that are much easier to commit to memory than to process and analysis the grammatical structure
3. empirical experience shows that many sentences have come into existence not because their grammatical structure makes sense, but because they have been “uttered before” and have just taken root in society
4. sentence structuring comes naturally, not with deliberate consideration to its grammatical structure
5. non-native speakers should concentrate on context and “lexis” rather than grammar.

While the writer makes some cogent arguments, I can’t help feeling that he’s forgetting the “human factor” in learning a language, particularly for non-native speakers. As part of the normal human psychological search for comfort and stability when immerse in a new environment (in our case, a new language), it is nature to look for the most stylized and solid aspect of the language. In many languages, if not all, this can be found in grammar. Grammar is rooted in specifics, and language students feel that they’ll have a much more solid grasps on these specifics than something abstract like “lexis” and “phrase packages.” These aspects, although important, come more easily with time as the student becomes more and more immersed in the foreign culture. With this point, it seems like the author is almost making a categorical argument for the necessity of cultural immersion when one picks up a new language. So this brings us back to the root of our class: is the separation of language and culture impossible, are they permanently intertwined, or can one adopt one without the other?
In regards to this grammar vs. “lexis” issue, I also found it interesting to investigate whether grammar can analogously be considered the “techy” side of language, and “lexis” be the “fuzzy” side. Does this then imply that a person’s predilection for one or the other (grammar or vocabulary) depending on which side of one’s brain is more developed (or if they’re right or left handed)?

This article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040428062634.htm on “language centers” in the brain seems to partially address that question. The article states that in individuals from childhood to age 25, “language capacity in right-handers grows stronger in the left hemisphere of the brain” So if we were to continue with the initial hypothesis that grammar is the more “techy” part of language, add it to the known fact that the left hemisphere of the brain processes information in a linear fashion, dissecting the parts of the whole, then it can be logically concluded that grammar is perhaps most easily learned in this age interval. This brings us to the interesting issue of whether as the language center shifts when a person ages, the person gains more and more ability to adapt a more holistic view of speech (and thus adding more complex “lexis” arrangements), thereby being more coherent in discourse. So, then, the question leads to why as people age, they tend to be slower in speech, and how does conditions like autism and Alzheimer’s fit into the big picture? This will require much more research, something I’ll be sure to be on the look out for when reading advances in cognitive science.