2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1.2             Genie: raised in isolation                            

1.2.1       Genie is discovered at 13 years of age, brutally abused

While the case of Victor may have been that of simple child abandonment, it is quite different from enforced seclusion, where children are isolated from

even the outside environment and mistreated. One such well-documented case is that of a girl whom researchers called Genie (Curtiss et al., 1974; Fromkin et al., 1974; Curtiss, 1977, 1981; Rymer, 1993).

Genie (a pseudonym) was discovered in the early 1970s in the Los Angeles area of California. She was 13 years old and had been locked in a small room in her house by her father for the preceding 12 years! During the day she had been kept naked except for a harness that held her to an infant’s toilet seat. At night she was put into a restraining sleeping bag and placed in a covered crib that was in effect a cage. She was fed but never spoken to. Her father beat her frequently with a wooden stick and growled at her like a dog while doing so. Other than a couple of plastic raincoats, empty thread spools, an occasional magazine, and some empty containers that she was given to play with, she had nothing much to look at (the small windows in her room were covered by curtains), little to touch, little to do.

Genie’s mother eventually escaped, taking the child with her. It was in this way that the case was discovered by the authorities. As for the father, he committed suicide on the day he was to be put on trial for mistreating the child.

At the time of her discovery, Genie was in a pitiful physical condition and appeared to have no language. Based on the information later provided by her mother, the girl had started to begin to acquire language just prior to her confinement, when she was around 20 months of age. This is about the same age that Helen Keller (discussed later in this chapter) lost her hearing and vision. However, if Genie had learned to comprehend some basic elements of speech, she would have likely lost them after 12 years of living in silence.

1.2.2       Genie is given freedom and care

Like Victor, during her first few weeks of freedom Genie was alert and curious. But, unlike Victor, she displayed some ability to understand and even imitate (although poorly) some individual words, such as ‘mother’, ‘red’, and ‘bunny’. However, except for such words, she had little if any comprehension of grammatical structures (Fromkin et al., 1974, p. 87). Gener- ally, she responded only to gestures and to the intonation of words. Batteries of psychological tests indicated that her cognitive abilities were little more than those of a 2-year-old, with her language displaying many of the char- acteristics of 2-year-olds as they go through the initial stages of language learning.

After just a few months of care, however, Genie changed considerably. She grew, gained weight and strength, and was able to go on long walks. While her original speech production had been limited to a few utterances such as ‘No-more’ and ‘Stoppit’, by the end of a few months she had ac- quired the words for hundreds of objects! She had an intense curiosity about the names of things in the world around her.

1.2.3       Genie responds linguistically and socially

After about a year had passed since she was first discovered, Genie was evaluated again on her language ability (Curtiss, 1977). She was tested, for example, on a variety of syntactic structures, such as her understanding of simple negation, and could respond correctly to sentences like ‘Show me the bunny that does not have a carrot’ as opposed to ‘Show me the bunny that has a carrot’. She was tested on her understanding of adjectives, such  as ‘big’ and ‘little’ (‘Point to the big circle’). She was required to place objects with respect to other objects, e.g. ‘in’, ‘under’, ‘next to’, ‘behind’, to see if she understood the relationships expressed by those prepositions. It was found that Genie’s ability to understand speech had improved quite  rapidly, although her progress in speech production was very slow and continued to be slow.

1.2.4       Genie reaches a peak in language learning

Genie’s language learning was studied for about eight years, after which  time she made little progress. Her language ability, both in terms of under- standing and production, remained well below normal and her speech con- tinued to be ungrammatical. Genie, like Victor, was not able to acquire a normal level of language despite receiving a great amount of care, attention, instruction, and linguistic input.

Genie was finally placed in a home for retarded adults, where she now lives (Rymer, 1993). This was the end of the scientific collection of data on Genie’s linguistic or other development. (The interested reader is urged to view the fine televison programme concerning the Genie case produced by NOVA, Public Broadcasting (PBS) in the USA, available on videotape under the title, Genie: Secrets of the Wild Child.)