2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1.1             Victor: the Wild Boy of Aveyron                   

Scientific investigation into the matter of wild children increased dramatically in January of the year 1800 when a boy was captured by hunters in the woods near the village of Saint-Sernin in the Aveyron district of France. (For detailed accounts of Victor see Lane, 1976, and Shattuck, 1981.)

The boy appeared to be 11 or 12 years old, was naked except for what was left of a tattered shirt, and he made no sounds other than guttural animal-like noises. He seemed to have survived on his own for years in the wild. Probably he had been abandoned originally, but at what age or by whom could not be ascertained.

 

1.1.1       Itard tries teaching speech but fails

Not long after, the boy’s education was assigned to an eager educator, the creative and dedicated Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard. Itard set up an ambitious programme with goals that included social as well as language training. The Wild Boy was given the name ‘Victor’ by Itard and his education began with intense work that involved a variety of games and activities that Itard designed to socialize Victor and make him aware of the world around him. These had a dramatic positive effect.

Speech training with Victor proved to be very frustrating for Itard. It centred around simply trying to get Victor to repeat some words and speech sounds. Victor first had to learn from where speech sounds were originat- ing before he could associate such sounds with language. Eventually, Victor came to be able to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment and he was even able to differentiate the sounds of normal speech from the poorly pronounced speech sounds made by the deaf chil- dren in the institute for the deaf where he now resided.

Victor first learned to repeat the sound ‘li’, apparently his personal contrac- tion of ‘Julie’, the name of the daughter of an assistant at the institute, Madame Guérin. In addition, he would repeat the phrase ‘Oh Dieu!’ (Oh God!), which he picked up from Madame Guérin. He also learned to say the word for milk (lait in French). With regard to this word, however, Itard noted that Victor would generally repeat it when given milk, but would not really use the word in a communicative sense, such as in asking for milk. On the other hand, Victor was able to comprehend speech in the form of commands for household chores, and made a specific sound each time he wanted a wheel- barrow ride. It was not clear, though, that the means of communication was actually language rather than simply the recognition of environmental context.

 

1.1.2       Itard tries reading and writing with success

Itard decided to abandon attempts to teach Victor language by speech imi- tation and moved on to another of his goals, to sharpen the boy’s perceptual abilities. He embarked on a programme of having Victor learn to match colours and shapes, and then match drawings with the objects they represented.

Following an insightful idea, he then set about teaching Victor the letters of the alphabet using letters on individual cards. The boy learned the milk word lait again, but this time in the form of alphabetic letters. Victor was

able to spell it out, at first backwards, then upside down, since that is how he had first seen it from across the table. Of his own accord, he later picked out those letters and seemed to use them to spell out a request for milk when he was taken on a visit by Itard to a friend’s home. However, it is possible that Victor may have simply been showing off his new toys, the cards, to Itard’s friend.

Eventually, Victor did make progress in reading. Initially, Victor took written words such as ‘book’ to mean a specific object, a particular book, and eventually he learned to associate the words with classes of objects, in this example, all books. (Note that although the words are written here in English, it is French spelling that is implied.)

Victor also went through some of the same problems of overgeneralization that ordinary children go through in learning language, considering, for example, a knife to be ‘razor’. He learned adjectives such as ‘big’ and ‘small’, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, and a variety of colour words. He also learned verbs such as ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘touch’, and ‘throw’. Each of these words was written on     a card for him. In the beginning, he communicated with others using the word cards. Later he was able to write the words himself, from memory.

In less than a year, Itard was able to issue a report stating, in effect, that Victor’s senses, memory, and attention were intact, that he had the ability to compare and judge, and that he could read and write to some extent. Victor’s speech did not improve, however, and it was speech that Itard was con- cerned with. Unfortunately, he did not follow up on teaching reading, which could have benefited Victor greatly.

 

1.1.3       Itard tries again at speech, fails, then gives up

Itard devoted five years to Victor. Near the end of that period, he tried once again to teach the boy to speak. These attempts failed too; soon afterwards Itard decided to end his work with Victor. He arranged for Victor to live in a house with Madame Guérin. Victor lived there for 18 years, continuing to be mute until his death in 1828 at the age of about 38.

The interested reader is urged to view the excellent movie, The Wild Child, (its original French title is L’Enfant Sauvage), made by François Truffault in 1969, which portrays the story of Itard and Victor.