2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1.4             Chelsea: began to learn language at age 32  

1.4.1       Misdiagnosed as retarded, not deaf

Another case in an entirely different context is that of a girl, Chelsea (a pseudonym), who only began to learn language at the age of 32! When she was born, Chelsea’s family thought that she was deaf. Initially misdiagnosed as retarded, and because she lived in a rural area in Northern California,

she did not receive any language training or instruction of any kind. Unlike Victor and Genie, Chelsea grew up in a loving family environment.

When, at the age of 32, her hearing was properly tested, it was discovered that she was not totally deaf but only partially hearing-impaired. Hearing aids were fitted to correct for the impairment and with them she was able to hear speech relatively normally.

1.4.2       Language development

Through language instruction, Chelsea has developed an extensive vocabu- lary. Unlike Genie, though, her syntactic profile appears to lack any word order. Curtiss (1989) provides examples of the utterances Chelsea has pro- duced. Some of these are:

The small a the hat.                      Richard eat peppers hot.

Orange Tim car in.                        Banana the eat.

I Wanda be drive come.               The boat sits water on. Breakfast eating girl.              Combing hair the boy. The girl is come the ice cream shopping buying the man.

(pp. 119–20)

Though Chelsea has developed rapidly in vocabulary and the use of language in a wide range of speech acts (complaints, requests) and social rituals (greetings), she was unable to form grammatically correct utter- ances and to remain on topic. Evidently, since that time there has been improvement, since Chelsea, who is now about 50 years old, has held a job where she does some reading and writing. She interacts socially and is independent.

4.5.1       Becomes deaf and blind at 19 months then secures a teacher

Any discussion of language deprivation cannot be considered complete without the case of Helen Keller (1880–1969). Keller was born normal and then, due to illness, she became deaf and blind at the age of 19 months. Thus, before tragedy struck, she had already experienced some degree of language learning and would probably have had some degree of compre- hension and production. That was the extent of her language exposure until six years later in 1887, at age 7, when Anne Sullivan Macy came to teach her language. Macy, herself partly blind and only 21 years old, was engaged by Keller’s parents on the recommendation of Alexander Graham Bell.

Before becoming famous as the inventor of the telephone (and after, as well), Bell was a noted educator of the deaf, as was his Scottish father before him. Bell’s mother and his own wife were deaf. Bell was, therefore, quite familiar with deafness and the problems involved in deaf education. (See Chapter 2 for more on Bell’s involvement in deaf education.) Helen’s case was more complex, though, since she was blind as well. On the frontis- piece of this book Helen is shown communicating with Bell by hand signals while she is also communicating with Sullivan Macy by touching her lips and vocal chords with her hands.

4.5.2       Helen learns language

In spite of Keller’s seemingly overwhelming sensory handicaps, Sullivan Macy’s efforts to teach Helen language through the sense of touch were successful. (Sullivan Macy was trained at the Perkins’ Institute for the Blind in Boston and it was there that she learned communication techniques in teaching blind–deaf persons.) Thus, Helen learned language through touch and later even learned to speak. This was accomplished by Helen’s directly touching the speech articulators around the face (mouth, lips, vocal cords, throat, etc.) of Sullivan Macy and others (see frontispiece photo of Bell, Keller and Sullivan Macy).

Even though Helen was unable to hear and receive any auditory feed- back of her own speech, she nevertheless was able to produce speech even though she could not receive any auditory feedback. (She may have re- tained some of the speech ability that she had acquired prior to her illness.) While recognizable, her speech was somewhat strange, since she spoke in    a high-pitched monotone manner (similar to that of the high-pitched voice of Genie). Helen went on to learn to read and produce Braille.

Keller’s (1903/1972) autobiography, The Story of My Life, is fascinating to read. That dramatic moment when she learned her first word is movingly described:

[My teacher] brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure. We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some- one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool water stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word w-a-t-e-r, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of some- thing forgotten, a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!

(1972, pp. 11–12)

The essential aspect of language, that a sound, sign, or touch could repre- sent an object, had been discovered. It is significant that although Helen  had no words for the situations and events that she describes prior to her learning of her first word, she was able to think clearly about her life and then to write about it later. (This bears on the issue that is discussed in Chapter 9, which is whether language is necessary in order for persons to think.)

Keller went on to graduate from Radcliffe (the Harvard University division for women in those days) with honours and to become an acclaimed lec- turer and writer in the service of handicapped people around the world.

How is it that Keller was able to attain the level of language excellence that she did? It might be argued that Keller’s success in language learning was beneficially affected by the relatively short encounter she had with speech in her infancy. This may be so to some extent. However, the fact that, after the lengthy six-year period of not being exposed to language, it took as long as it did for her to learn her first word, ‘water’, suggests that her pre-illness exposure to language was of minimal benefit.

4.6             Oxana and Edik: raised by dogs                    

Abandoned children are still being found. Two cases of children being cared for by dogs have been recently reported in Ukraine.

4.6.1       Oxana

In 1991, a girl, Oxana, was discovered living in a kennel in the back garden of the family home in a town in Ukraine. She was born in 1983 and her medical history reported her to be a healthy child. However, her parents were alcoholics, and one day 3-year-old Oxana was simply left outside. Looking for shelter, she crawled into a dog house, and for the next five years a dog helped her survive, undoubtedly, by providing her with food and warmth.

When Oxana was found, she behaved and moved around on all fours like a dog. She mostly barked, could hardly speak, and did not seem to think that speaking was necessary. At the time of this writing Oxana is 19 years old, and lives in a home for the mentally ill. Her speech has improved, she can now talk in simple sentences, but she has difficulties relating to people. Like the cases of Victor and Genie, Oxana’s development seems to come to  a limit and progresses no further. Her doctor, Vladimir Nagorny, comments that they have been trying to find her an occupation and teach her how to live among people, but most likely she will never be considered a normal person again.

4.6.2       Edik

In 1999 in a small town in Ukraine, social workers found 4-year-old Edik in a deserted apartment. It turned out that his mother was an alcoholic, too, and though she stayed in the apartment from time to time, she hadn’t cared for the boy since he was 2 years old. He had to turn to stray dogs for sur- vival. Two years after his discovery, Edik was living in a foster home. His language skills and grammar improved, but slowly. At the age of 6, his speech was like that of a 3-year-old. James Law, Professor of Language and Communication Studies, City University, London, studied Edik and remains optimistic about his language progress; Edik’s social skills, however, are likely to remain impaired, he says.

4.7             A critical age for first-language learning?      

4.7.1       Why did only Isabelle and Helen fully learn language?

Why is it that Isabelle and Helen learned language to the full but Victor, Genie, and Chelsea did not? Why didn’t Victor, Genie, and Chelsea learn more than they did, particularly considering their teachers’ dedication to their welfare and their use of evidently sound educational ideas? One thing is certain, and that is: without exposure to language, children will not acquire language. Children need some form of exposure, be it in the form  of speech, signs, writing, or touch, before language learning can occur and that exposure should be offered as early as possible in the child’s life.

4.7.2       Two major factors governing language learning

In reviewing the details of the cases of Victor, Genie, Isabelle, Chelsea, and Helen, we can identify two major factors that could have operated to influ- ence their varying success in language learning. These relate to exposure to language and the extent of non-linguistic trauma: (1) the age at which expos- ure to language began, and (2) the extent of any physical, psychological, and social trauma prior to exposure to language.

As far as Victor is concerned, we do not know why he had been roaming alone in the wild, nor do we know whether he had experienced any lan- guage prior to his capture. It may be that for most, or all, of the estimated  11 or so years of his life, his exposure to language and to ordinary human life had been minimal. However, he could have had some exposure to language before his abandonment. But why he was abandoned will never be known, although there is the possibility that he could have been re- garded as retarded. He could not have been very retarded, for, as Malson

(1972) has argued, at least average or better intelligence is necessary for one to be able to survive in the wild.

Barring the unlikelihood of his being raised by animals, Victor must have been raised by humans, at least in infancy, for some period of time. Because we have no information regarding such crucial circumstances, there is no way we can state with any assurance why Victor was not able to attain full competence in speech or written language. Whether Victor was or was not normal at birth is something that we shall never know. Lenneberg (1967) was undoubtedly correct when he said, ‘In the absence of information on such a point, virtually no generalization may be made with regard to human development’ (p. 142).

4.7.3       Why did Genie not progress more than she did?

Genie, at 13 years, was about Victor’s age (11 or 12 years) before she was exposed to language. Nevertheless, despite over 11 years of isolation, she was able to develop a much higher level of language than Victor; her achieve- ment was mainly in the area of speech comprehension. Genie’s accomplish- ment in this respect establishes that, if there is a critical age for acquiring the fundamentals of a first language, i.e. grammatical structures, grammat- ical rules, and vocabulary, the limiting age cannot be very young, for Genie was over 13 years old when she began to learn language.

However, there is still some controversy over Genie’s accomplishments. Although Curtiss, after years of collecting data on Genie, concludes, ‘She had a clear semantic ability but could not learn syntax’ (Rymer, 1993,

p. 156), other researchers disagree. Jones (1995) argues that inconsistencies in the presentation of the data on Genie call into question the exact extent of her progress in acquiring English syntax. Yet Genie’s attained level of speech comprehension was significant. It is certainly beyond that which would be expected if there really were a critical age for the learning of syntax.

That Genie’s speech production ability was faulty in terms of pronunciation may be related to factors that operate in the learning of second-language pronunciation by ordinary people (see Chapter 6), where it has been found that the ability to control certain muscles of the body, in particular the articulators of speech (the tongue, mouth, vocal cords, etc.), generally begins to decline around 10 to 12 years of age. The fact that Genie had not used speech from infancy until she was 13 years old probably put her at a greater disadvantage than would be the case for a typical second-language learner of the same age. At least the ordinary second-language learner would, in using his or her first language, have had the benefit of exercising the articulators of speech for over a decade. Then, too, we cannot be sure that Genie’s poor speech ability was not the result of some negative psychological influence due to her long mistreatment.

4.7.4       Chelsea: insufficient evidence

Curtiss (1989) argues that Chelsea’s case demonstrates that, beyond a critical age for learning, syntax cannot be learned but that other aspects of language are not affected, such as vocabulary and the proper use of lan- guage in context (pragmatics). This view is not substantiated. The crucial  data for critical age lie in syntactic understanding and not production. Chelsea’s abilities in this regard were not adequately assessed, as far as we can tell.

4.7.5       The achievements of Isabelle and Helen

The language achievements of Isabelle and Helen contrast sharply with those of Victor and Genie. Why were these two girls able to do so well? The fact that Helen had been exposed to language during her first 19 months of life is not likely to have been the deciding factor because Isabelle did quite well even though she had no exposure to language before she was dis- covered at 6¹/₂ years of age. One thing Helen did have that some of the other children did not is a loving family. Even during her period of language deprivation, she was a member of a family who did their utmost on her behalf so that she could enjoy life. Isabelle, too, although she was confined with her mother, could benefit from the affection that her mother had for her. So, the critical variable here may be the affection and social support which both Helen and Isabelle were able to experience. This may have allowed them to develop intellectually despite their language deprivation. Some consideration might be given to the use of a form of communica- tion through gesture that Isabelle and her mother used. Deaf children have been known to develop their own sign-language systems complete with rudimentary syntax even when they have no exposure to formal sign language (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander, 1998). The gesture system used between Isabelle and her mother may have helped Isabelle to understand and learn the relationship between object and symbol crucial for language

learning.