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In 1970, a wild child was found in California. Genie, now in her fifties, has stirred up new questions about language and intelligence.
Only a few cases are recorded of human beings who have grown up without any real contact with other humans. So rare is the phenomenon that when a 12-year-old “wild boy” was found in the forest of Aveyron in 18th-century France, the government ordered him brought to Paris to be examined by doctors in an institution for deaf-mutes. There he came under the care of the physician Jean Itard, who also acted as the boy’s tutor. Itard left detailed records of his experience, which was later dramatized in the 1970 movie The Wild Child. Although the boy was not deaf, and despite Itard’s work, the child never learned to speak.
In 1970, a wild child was found in California: a girl of 13 who had been isolated in a small room and had not been spoken to by her parents since infancy. “Genie,” as she was later dubbed to protect her privacy by the psycholinguists who tested her, could not stand erect. At the time, she was unable to speak: she could only whimper.
The case came to light when Genie’s 50-year-old mother ran away from her 70-year-old husband after a violent quarrel and took the child along. The mother was partially blind and applied for public assistance. The social worker in the welfare office took one look at Genie and called her supervisor, who called the police. Genie was sent to the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital for tests. Charges of willful abuse were filed against both her parents, according to the Los Angeles Times. On the day he was due to appear in court, however, Genie’s father shot himself to death.
He left a note in which he wrote. “The world will never understand.”
The discovery of Genie aroused intense curiosity among psychologists, linguists, neurologists, and others who study brain development. They were eager to know what Genie’s mental level was at the time she was found and whether she would be capable of developing her faculties. “It’s a terribly important case,” says Harlan Lane, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University who wrote The Wild Boy of Aveyron. “Since our morality doesn’t allow us to conduct deprivation experiments with human beings, these unfortunate people are all we have to go on.”
Genie was 24 years old when this article was written in 1981. Through years of rehabilitation and special training, she has been observed and repeatedly tested. Hundreds of videotapes record her progress. She has been the subject of several journal articles and a book. Since the book was published in 1977, additional studies have brought into focus some of the issues raised by Genie’s case. Far from settling any scientific controversies, she has provided fresh ammunition for arguments on both sides of a major issue: is there a “critical period” in a child’s development during which, if language acquisition is not stimulated or encouraged, it may be impaired later on or not emerge at all? She has inspired a California researcher who worked with her, Susan Curtiss, to develop a controversial hypothesis about how language learning affects the two hemispheres of the brain. Genie has also stirred up debate about the relationship between language and other mental abilities. As a result, new research is now in progress on the surprising language ability of some mentally retarded children.
As described in Curtiss’s book, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child” (Academic Press), Genie is living proof of human resilience. It is surprising that she survived at all. Her father apparently hated children and tried to strangle Genie’s mother while she was pregnant with her first child. According to Curtiss’s book, when an earlier baby girl was born, he put the child in the garage because he couldn’t stand her crying: the baby died of pneumonia at two-and-a half months. A second child, a boy, died two days after birth, allegedly from choking on his own mucus. A third child was rescued and cared for by his grandmother when he was three years old and is still alive. Genie, the fourth child, was denied such help, however,
Name: ______________________________________ Period: _______ Date: ____________________
Introduction to Psychology Mr. Gallucci
THE C IVILIZING OF G ENIE – M AYA PINES
because shortly after she was born, her grandmother was hit by a truck and killed.
From the age of 20 months, when her family moved into her grandmother’s house, until she was 13 and a half, Genie lived in nearly total isolation. Curtiss’ book and newspaper reports describe Genie’s life at the time: naked and restrained by a harness that her father had fashioned, she was left to sit on her potty seat day after day. She could move only her hands and feet. She had nothing to do. At night, when she was not forgotten, she was put into a sort of straitjacket and caged in a crib that had wire-mesh sides and an overhead cover. She was often hungry. If she made any noise, her father beat her. “He never spoke to her,” wrote Curtiss. “He made barking sounds and he growled at her.... Her mother was terrified of him—and besides, she was too blind to take much care of Genie. The task fell largely on Genie’s brother, who, following his father’s instructions, did not speak to Genie either. He fed her hurriedly and in silence, mostly milk and baby foods. There was little for Genie to listen to. Her mother and brother spoke in low voices for fear of her father.
When Genie arrived in Children’s Hospital in November 1970, she was a pitiful, malformed, incontinent, unsocialized, and severely malnourished creature. Although she was beginning to show signs of pubescence, she weighed only 59 pounds. She could not straighten her arms or legs. She did not know how to chew. She salivated a great deal and spent much of her time spitting. And she was eerily silent. Various physicians, psychologists, and therapists were brought in to examine her during those first months. Shortly after Genie was admitted as a patient, she was given the Vineland Social Maturity Scale and the Preschool Attainment Record, on which she scored as low as normal one-year-olds. At first, she seemed to recognize only her own name and the word sorry. After a while, she began to say two phrases that she used as if they were single words, in a ritualized way: stopit and nomore.
Psychologists at the hospital did not really know how much she understood. Nor did they know how to evaluate whatever language she had: to what degree did it deviate from the standard pattern? They eventually asked Victoria A. Fromkin, a UCLA psycholinguist, to study Genie’s language abilities. Fromkin brought along a graduate student, Susan Curtiss (now an assistant professor of linguistics at UCLA), who became so fascinated by Genie that she
devoted much of the next seven years of her life to researching the girl’s linguistic development.
Working with Genie was not an easy task. Although she had learned to walk with a jerky motion and became more or less toilet trained during her first seven months at Children’s Hospital, Genie still had many disconcerting habits. She salivated and spat constantly, so much so that her body and clothing were filled with spit and “reeked of a foul odor,” as Curtiss recounts. When excited or agitated, she urinated, leaving her companion to deal with the results…Nevertheless, Genie was decidedly human, and her delight at discovering the world—as well as her obvious progress—made the struggle worthwhile. When Curtiss started working with Genie, she began by simply spending time with her or taking her to visit places, in order to establish a relationship. She took Genie to the supermarket, where Genie walked around the store and examined the meats and the plastic containers with some curiosity. Every house seemed exciting to Genie, who had spent so much of her life cooped up in one room: on walks she would often go up to the front doors of houses, hoping that someone would open the door and let her in.
During her first seven months of freedom, Genie had learned to recognize many new words—probably hundreds by the time Curtiss started investigating her knowledge of language systematically in June 1971. And she had begun to speak. On a visit with Curtiss to the home of one of the therapists, Genie eagerly explored every room, then picked up a decorator pillow: when asked what it was, she replied “pillow.” Asked if she wanted to see the family cat, Genie replied, “No. No. Cat,” and shook her head vehemently. Most of the time, however, she said nothing.
At first Genie spoke only in one-word utterances, as toddlers do when they start to talk. Then in July of 1971, she began to string two words together on her own, not just while imitating what somebody else had said. She said “big teeth,” “little marble,” “two hand.” A little later she produced some verbs: “Curtiss come,” “Want milk.” In November of the same year she progressed to occasional three-word strings: “small two cup,” “white clear box.”
Unlike normal children, however, Genie never asked questions, despite many efforts to train her to do so. Nor did she understand much grammar. And her speech development was abnormally slow. A few weeks after normal children reach the two-word
In her book, Curtiss describes how Genie occasionally used her limited language to remember her past and to tell about details of her confinement. “Father hit arm. Big wood. Genie cry,” she said once. Another time, when Curtiss took her into the city to browse through shops, Genie said, “Genie happy.”
In 1978, Genie’s mother became her legal guardian. During all the years of Genie’s rehabilitation, her mother had also received help. An eye operation restored her sight, and a social worker tried to improve her behavior toward Genie. Genie’s mother had never been held legally responsible for the child’s inhuman treatment Charges of child abuse were dismissed in 1970, when her lawyer argued that she “was, herself, a victim of the same psychotic individual”—her husband. There was “nothing to show purposeful or willful cruelty,” he said.
Nevertheless, for many years the court assigned a guardian for Genie. Shortly after Genie’s mother was named guardian, she astounded the therapists and researchers who had worked with Genie by filing a suit against Curtiss and the Children’s Hospital among others—on behalf of herself and her daughter—in which she charged that they had disclosed private and confidential information concerning Genie and her mother for “prestige and profit” and had subjected Genie to “unreasonable and outrageous” testing, not for treatment, but to exploit Genie for personal and economic benefits. According to the Los Angeles Times, the lawyer who represents Genie’s mother estimated that the actual damages could total $500,000.
As of 1981, the case had not yet come to court, but in the two years since it was filed, Genie has been completely cut off from the professionals at Children’s Hospital and UCLA. Since she is too old to be in a foster home, she apparently is living in a board-and-care home for adults who cannot live alone. The Los Angeles Times reported that as of 1979 her mother was working as a domestic servant. All research on Genie’s language and intellectual development has come to a halt.
Apart from Chomsky and his followers, who believe that fundamental language ability is innate and unrelated to intelligence, most psychologists assume that the development of language is tied to—and emerges from—the development of nonverbal intelligence, as de-scribed by Piaget. However, Genie’s obvious nonverbal intelligence— her use of tools, her drawings, her knowledge of causality, her
mental maps of space—did not lead her to an equivalent competence in the grammar normal children acquire by the age of five.
Genie Update:
Genie now lives in a sheltered accommodation in an undisclosed location in Southern California; it is at least her sixth adult foster home. Her mother died in
- She is survived by Genie's older brother, John.
Questions (please answer on a separate sheet):
1) Did scientists do Genie a disservice or were they really trying to help? Explain.
2) Do you believe there is a critical period in which language acquisition must occur? Look to your own study of language.
3) Can Genie be helped now? Explain.
