Both parents were charged with abuse , but Genie's father committed suicide the day before he was due to appear in court, leaving behind a note stating that "the world will never understand. Genie's life prior to her discovery was one of utter deprivation. She spent most of her days tied naked to her potty chair only able to move her hands and feet. When she made noise, her father would beat her. Her father, mother, and older brother rarely spoke to her. The rare times her father did interact with her, it was to bark or growl.
The story of her case soon spread, drawing attention from both the public and the scientific community. With so much interest in her case, the question became what should be done with her. A team of psychologists and language experts began the process of rehabilitating Genie.
Psychologist David Rigler was part of the "Genie team" and he explained the process. She had a quality of somehow connecting with people, which developed more and more but was present, really, from the start. She had a way of reaching out without saying anything, but just somehow by the kind of look in her eyes, and people wanted to do things for her. Her rehabilitation team also included graduate student Susan Curtiss and psychologist James Kent. Silent, incontinent, and unable to chew, she initially seemed only able to recognize her own name and the word "sorry.
After assessing Genie's emotional and cognitive abilities, Kent described her as "the most profoundly damaged child I've ever seen … Genie's life is a wasteland. She soon began to make rapid progression in specific areas, quickly learning how to use the toilet and dress herself. Over the next few months, she began to experience more developmental progress but remained poor in areas such as language.
She enjoyed going out on day trips outside of the hospital and explored her new environment with an intensity that amazed her caregivers and strangers alike. Curtiss suggested that Genie had a strong ability to communicate nonverbally , often receiving gifts from total strangers who seemed to understand the young girl's powerful need to explore the world around her. Part of the reason why Genie's case fascinated psychologists and linguists so deeply was that it presented a unique opportunity to study a hotly contested debate about language development.
Essentially, it boils down to the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Does genetics or environment play a greater role in developing language? Nativists believe that the capacity for language is innate, while empiricists suggest that it is environmental variables that play a key role.
Nativist Noam Chomsky suggested that acquiring language could not be fully explained by learning alone. Instead, he proposed that children are born with a language acquisition device LAD , an innate ability to understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to learn the language at a remarkable pace.
Linguist Eric Lenneberg suggests that like many other human behaviors, the ability to acquire language is subject to critical periods. A critical period is a limited span of time during which an organism is sensitive to external stimuli and capable of acquiring certain skills. According to Lenneberg, the critical period for language acquisition lasts until around age After the onset of puberty, he argued, the organization of the brain becomes set and no longer able to learn and utilize language in a fully functional manner.
Genie's case presented researchers with a unique opportunity. If given an enriched learning environment, could she overcome her deprived childhood and learn language even though she had missed the critical period? If she could, it would suggest that the critical period hypothesis of language development was wrong. If she could not, it would indicate that Lenneberg's theory was correct.
Despite scoring at the level of a 1-year-old upon her initial assessment, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary. She started by learning single words and eventually began putting two words together much the way young children do. Curtiss began to feel that Genie would be fully capable of acquiring language. After a year of treatment, she even started putting three words together occasionally. In children going through normal language development, this stage is followed by what is known as a language explosion.
Children rapidly acquire new words and begin putting them together in novel ways. Unfortunately, this never happened for Genie. Her language abilities remained stuck at this stage and she appeared unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way. At this point, her progress leveled off and her acquisition of new language halted.
While Genie was able to learn some language after puberty, her inability to use grammar which Chomsky suggests is what separates human language from animal communication offers evidence for the critical period hypothesis. Of course, Genie's case is not so simple. Not only did she miss the critical period for learning language, but she was also horrifically abused.
She was malnourished and deprived of cognitive stimulation for most of her childhood. Researchers were also never able to fully determine if Genie suffered from pre-existing cognitive deficits. As an infant, a pediatrician had identified her as having some type of mental delay.
So researchers were left to wonder whether Genie had suffered from cognitive deficits caused by her years of abuse or if she had been born with some degree of mental retardation. Psychiatrist Jay Shurley helped assess Genie after she was first discovered, and he noted that since situations like hers were so rare, she quickly became the center of a battle between the researchers involved in her case.
Arguments over the research and the course of her treatment soon erupted. A second died from birth complications. A third, a boy named John, survived, followed five years later by the girl who would become known as Genie. He brutalised John and locked his month-old daughter alone in a small bedroom, isolated and barely able to move. When not harnessed to a potty seat, she was constrained in a type of straitjacket and wire mesh-covered crib. Wiley imposed silence with his fists and a piece of wood.
That is how Genie passed the s. Irene, stricken by fear and poor eyesight, finally fled in Things happened swiftly after she blundered into the wrong welfare office.
Wiley, charged with child abuse, shot himself. Pediatricians, psychologists, linguists and other experts from around the US petitioned to examine and treat her, for here was a unique opportunity to study brain and speech development — how language makes us human.
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.
In the various foster homes Genie was placed, she was subjected to more mental and physical abuse. On one such occasion, she was beaten for vomiting. Genie has hardly opened her mouth and uttered a single word since. In my opinion, if she had remained in one home and not moved to 7 homes and had been taught much like a baby, I think that by her twenties, she would have probably inproved her lanunguage skills.
Of course she spoke at a 3 year old level, she was 13 when found and had never spoken or had been taught anything, so if in a couple of years she progressed to 3, it is a big accomplishment.. Why couldn't one of her so called therapists whom said loved so much have taken her inn???
I speak as a foster parent This is an interesting case study. So sad for Genie that she was never really given much of a chance in life. I am not sure if we have really learned anything yet as a society.
More people need to hear this story. Fascinating and sad hub. I can't help but think that these children might have done better had they had a caregiver devoted to actually helping them learn and adapt, rather than ones that wanted to use them as experiments.
No wonder they couldn't progress. I imagine the pressure was intense and overwhelming after a childhood of neglect and captivity. I hope the human race does better should another case present itself. Great article, I really enjoyed reading! Voting and sharing! What a fascinating share on this subject. Sadly, Genie suffered without any solutions. I am touched by this and only hope we can learn from this story. I remember reading about feral children and language learning in high school. I think we talked about "Genie" as a case study.
How cruel to have used her that way then left her to continue suffering rather than trying to help her - or at least not continue to be abused. Fascinating story, one that I remember, but interesting to know where poor Genie is. Your research is good too. It is so sad that some children have such hard lives, almost always brought about by their early childhood. Personal Finance. Welcome to HubPages. Related Articles. By Doug West.
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