And how much more could we contribute to the education of handicapped children everywhere by undertaking the training of this latest, and perhaps last, wild child, raised in the forests utterly cut off from society? If this intuition is wrong, the forbidden experiment is incoherent. In fact, the social and the natural may be irretrievably entangled in development.
In part this is because a social environment that includes other human beings is inevitably more natural for a human infant than any wholly artificial environment that could be constructed to replace it. Even the unfolding of innately determined human traits relies on a social environment. For example, virtually every human infant is exposed to a language and learns it; an infant who was never exposed to any language could not possibly speak one.
Yet it is the children who do learn a language—through social interactions—who illustrate the natural human capacity. Her book teaches us about failures in our history to which we must pay more attention than usual because these failures cannot simply be overcome.
In fact, even the stories in her own book contradict her pessimistic assessment. Over the past three centuries, the language impairments of wild children have often been contrasted with those of deaf or developmentally disabled children. As a result, contemporary expectations for the lives of deaf and disabled children make regular appearances in this history. In , when Victor of Aveyron was first brought to Paris, for example, the common wisdom was that deaf children were incapable of thought.
The successes of his students brought Sicard immense fame and helped win recognition of the now unremarkable fact that deaf children are fully human. The trajectory of the developmental sciences more generally has proceeded in the same direction, continuously increasing our appreciation of young children as worthy of interest and respect and as conceptual thinkers in their own right.
By the time an English speaker is 17 years old, she knows, on average, about 60, words, more than ten for every day of her life. Even more interesting, though, is how children are learning all these words. In one experiment, scientists give an month-old child an interesting novel object e. In short, what we have learned from studies of very young children is that they are already making rich and sophisticated inferences about the object to which the adult intends this new word to refer.
In all, the tales of wild children are striking and instructive but atypical. The history of the developmental sciences is not merely a history of failures. Through experiments that are not forbidden, we do, slowly, reveal ourselves to ourselves.
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A Political and Literary Forum. Menu Search Donate Shop Join. She shuffled with a sort of bunny hop and urinated and defecated when stressed. Doctors called her the most profoundly damaged child they had ever seen. Progress initially was promising. Genie learned to play, chew, dress herself and enjoy music. She expanded her vocabulary and sketched pictures to communicate what words could not. She performed well on intelligence tests. For many of us, our thoughts are verbally encoded.
She could hold a set of pictures so they told a story. She could create all sorts of complex structures from sticks. She had other signs of intelligence. The lights were on. Curtiss, who was starting out as an academic at that time, formed a tight bond with Genie during walks and shopping trips mainly for plastic buckets, which Genie collected.
Her curiosity and spirit also enchanted hospital cooks, orderlies and other staff members. Genie showed that lexicon seemed to have no age limit. But grammar, forming words into sentences, proved beyond her, bolstering the view that beyond a certain age, it is simply too late.
The window seems to close, said Curtiss, between five and Genie definitely engaged with the world. She could draw in ways you would know exactly what she was communicating. Yet there was to be no Helen Keller-style breakthrough.
On the contrary, by , feuding divided the carers and scientists. Each side accused the other of exploitation. Research funding dried up and Genie was moved to an inadequate foster home. Irene briefly regained custody only to find herself overwhelmed — so Genie went to another foster home, then a series of state institutions under the supervision of social workers who barred access to Curtiss and others.
Russ Rymer, a journalist who detailed the case in the s in two New Yorker articles and a book, Genie: a Scientific Tragedy , painted a bleak portrait of photographs from her 27th birthday party. Her dark hair has been hacked off raggedly at the top of her forehead, giving her the aspect of an asylum inmate. Jay Shurley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science who was at that party, and her 29th, told Rymer she was miserable, stooped and seldom made eye contact.
But a melancholy thread connects those she left behind. For the surviving scientists it is regret tinged with anguish. Curtiss, who wrote a book about Genie , and is one of the few researchers to emerge creditably from the saga, feels grief-stricken to this day.
They never let me have any contact with her. I long to see her. This took over my life, my worldview. A lot about this case left me shaken. Maybe this is cowardice — I was relieved to be able to turn away from the story. Little is known about her present condition, although an anonymous individual hired a private investigator to track her down in and described her as happy. But this contrasts with other reports.
Psychiatrist Jay Shurley visited her on her 27th and 29th birthdays and characterized her as largely silent, depressed , and chronically institutionalized. If you want to do rigorous science, then Genie's interests are going to come second some of the time.
If you only care about helping Genie, then you wouldn't do a lot of the scientific research. So, what are you going to do?
To make matters worse, the two roles, scientist and therapist , were combined in one person, in her case. So, I think future generations are going to study Genie's case not only for what it can teach us about human development but also for what it can teach us about the rewards and the risks of conducting 'the forbidden experiment. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Schoneberger T. Three myths from the language acquisition literature.
The Analysis of Verbal Behavior. American Psychological Association. Language acquisition device. Vanhove J. The critical period hypothesis in second language acquisition: A statistical critique and a reanalysis. PLoS One. The secret of the wild child [transcript]. Broadcasted Pines, M. The civilizing of Genie. In: Kasper LF, ed. Teaching English Through the Disciplines: Psychology. Whittier; Rigler, David. Collection of research materials related to linguistic-psychological studies of Genie pseudonym.
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I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Early Education. Language Acquisition. Progress Stalls. Continuing Care. Further Abuse.
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Rolls, G. Classic Case Studies in Psychology 2nd ed. London: Hodder Arnold;
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