1. LEGENDS, EVIL KINGS AND EMPERORS
2. VICTOR — THE WILD BOY OF AVEYRON
3. GENIE — RAISED IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
4. ISABELLE — CONFINED WITH A MUTE MOTHER
5. HELEN — THE FAMOUS DEAF-BLIND GIRL
6. A CRITICAL AGE FOR FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION?
 
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1. LEGENDS, EVIL KINGS AND EMPERORS

People have always wondered whether language   is instinctive,  something that is as natural to humans as walking and smiling.  They have also wondered whether, even without experiencing language, children would be able to produce it on their own. Some have even thought that children who had not been exposed to speech, would speak in the original language of humankind. Even as recent as the 16th century, we have such a brilliant thinker as Montaigne saying, “I believe that a child brought up in complete solitude, far from all intercourse   (which would be a difficult experiment to carry out) would have some kind of speech to express his idea, for it is not likely that nature would deprive us of this recourse when she has given it to many other animals.”  Not only did Montaigne believe that speech would emerge in humans without any exposure to language, but he also believed that many animals have language. Well, as the chapters in this book on child language and on animals and language testify, people are still interested in such questions.  We are interested in other questions as well, such as whether there is an age beyond which a person would be unable to learn language.

According to legend some experiments have already been carried out to determine what language, if any, children would develop if they were never exposed to ordinary speech. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a story which he heard from priests in Egypt about one of their kings, Psamtik I, who reigned during the 7th century BC.   According to the tale (which was already more than 300 years old when Herodotus heard it),  Psamtik gave two infants to a shepherd with the instruction that they be raised without anyone speaking in their presence. The king assumed that without  outside interference, the children would eventually speak the  original human language. The children’s first word (and perhaps only word!) was reported by the shepherd to have been becos, or something sounding like it. After inquiring of his learned advisors as to what what language that word might be in, the king was told that such sounds meant 'bread' in the Phrygian language, a language then spoken in what is now central Turkey. Psamtik felt that he had his answer regarding original language (although skeptics have suggested that the sounds could have come from the children imitating sheep or goats!).

Akbar the Great, the Mogul Emperor of India in the 16th century  is also reported to have carried out a similar experiment. However, in this instance, after years of confinement, the infants did not speak at all. Likewise it is said that James IV of Scotland also did such an experiment with infants. When he heard their first utterings, the king declared that it was in perfect Hebrew!

After the passage of centuries and even millennia, there is no way of knowing whether these monstrous experiments were really done in the way that it is said that they were done or that the results claimed were what was really found. In any case they do reflect  an  overall human fascination with language and what form a supposed 'natural' language would take. Medieval  European scholars, too,  spent a lot of time talking about and even trying to reconstruct the language which they believed was spoken by Adam and Eve. 'Natural man' also was one of the topics of the Enlightenment and from Rousseau’s "noble savage" to Edgar Rice Burrough's “Tarzan,” we are drawn to the idea of a human being untouched by civilization. Although educated people today do not believe that a child deprived of language from birth would start speaking the  original language of humankind, or any language at all, for that matter,  there is great scientific interest in original language(s) and in language deprivation. Deprivation or isolation cases, it is hoped, can tell us something about the nature of human language, how it is learned, or when it is best learned.

Since ethical considerations deter scientists from doing language deprivation experiments with children, scientists have been on the lookout for cases which do occur  without their intervention such as through peculiar circumstances or the perversity of human behavior. There are a number of recorded cases of so-called "feral", or wild, children. These are children who have been raised in the wild by animals, without human social contact.

Over the course of the past few centuries there have been reported cases of children raised by wolves, pigs,  sheep and other animals. (A fascinating collection of such cases is described in Malson’s book Wolf Children.) Then, too, there are children who have apparently survived on their own for years  in the wild; children who grew up even without the aid of animals. On a different level,  there are the cases of children who have been kept in confinement or isolation by their parents or others, and consequently were not exposed to language.  But there are also a great number of children who have been cared for by loving parents, but who,  because of a physical disability, such as deafness,  have nonetheless been deprived of language. Studying the deaf therefore might also provide us with insight into certain language questions in much the same way as does the study of children who have grown up in the wild or in isolation.

Unfortunately, as far as the cases involving wild children are concerned, most of the reports are not adequate for serious scientific analysis. They  are based on fragmentary data with usually no details other than that such and such a child had been found in such and such an environment. The exact nature of their language when found and the children’s  subsequent language development were not properly studied, most having lived before there was widespread  scientific psychological and linguistic interest in the matters raised by their condition. However, a few cases have been documented,  and we have chosen the most important of these for consideration here.
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  2. 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 in the woods near the village of Saint-Sernin in the Aveyron district of France. He 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. His general  appearance and behavior were  typical of the "wild men" of popular legend and 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 was not known.  Except for a few scars on his body,  he did not seem to have  been the victim of physical abuse. Attempts, however, to trace his personal history failed and nothing could be uncovered of his life before his being discovered.

Fortunately the France of 1800 was alive with the spirit of reform and scientific inquiry. When Sicard, the director of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, heard of the boy, he made efforts and succeeding in getting custody of him. Sicard's mission in life was the education of the deaf and he had already had considerable success with  deaf children many of whom had been discarded as retarded by the community. He showed that to a significant degree such   children could learn  to communicate in sign language and  could also learn to read and write. Sicard delighted in showing off the children, for, they proved themselves quite capable of engaging —through writing— in intelligent and often witty banter with his scientific colleagues. To Sicard, there seemed to be strong similarities between this wild child deprived of language by isolation and those children deprived of language and normal social contact because of deafness. He was eager therefore to try out on the Wild Boy (as he was then called)  some of the methods he had developed for educating the deaf.

Sicard, however, soon was to become discouraged with the lack of progress with the Wild Boy of Aveyron; the boy’s behavior was quite unlike that of the other children in the institute. Just a few months later, the institute issued a report stating that there had been no progress with the boy and that none could reasonably be expected. The report stopped short of actually diagnosing the child as retarded, but the comparisons they made with such cases shows clearly that they regarded him as being unteachable and they gave up on him. The boy's education was then taken over for the next five years by  a creative and dedicated educator, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. Itard set up an ambitious program for the boy, with goals which included social as well as language training. Itard’s success with the boy, as we shall relate, clearly shows that the assessment made by Sicard and the others at that institute had been quite incorrect.

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 which Itard designed to socialize Victor and  make him aware of the world around him. These had a dramatic effect. Victor took pleasure in long walks, taking baths, dressing himself and setting the table. Where, at the time of his capture, Victor had, for example, been virtually insensitive to temperature and ate with his hands,  he now insisted on the bath water being just right and having utensils when eating.  While earlier he had not reacted at all to the passing countryside during a carriage ride, he now took obvious pleasure in the changes of scenery. He enjoyed guessing games especially  of the ‘shell game’ variety such as where one tries to follow the quick movements of the hand in which a chestnut is held and then guesses under which of three cups the chestnut is hidden. He expressed a wide range of emotions and desires through movement, or "action language" as Itard called it. His senses appeared normal and from his reaction to the world around him.

Early language training with Victor, however,  was frustrating for Itard. In the beginning it centered around simply trying to get Victor to repeat some words and speech sounds. This he consistently failed to do, and Itard concluded that it was unrealistic to expect speech from an adolescent who had just spent virtually his entire life in the wild. Nevertheless, Victor could distinguish speech sounds from other  sounds in  the environment and he was even able to differentiate the sounds of a normal speaking voice from the poorly pronounced speech sounds made by the deaf-mute children in the Institute where he  resided.

 Victor's first speech training resulted in his being able to repeat the sound “li”, apparently his personal contraction of the name Julie, the name of the daughter of an assistant at the institute. In addition, he would repeat the phrase “Oh Dieu!” (‘Oh God’), which he picked up from one of Itard's assistants, 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 just repeat it when given milk, but not really use the word in a communicative sense,  such as in asking for milk.
Itard decided to abandon attempts to teach Victor language by  speech imitation and moved on to another of his goals, to sharpen the boy's perceptual abilities. He embarked on a program of having Victor learn to match colors and shapes, and then match drawings with the objects they represented. Following a brilliant idea, he then set about teaching Victor the letters of the alphabet using cut-out letters. 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 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 used them to spell out his request for milk when he was taken on a visit to someone’s house. Clearly, Victor had learned the relation between written symbol and object. In its own way, this accomplishment may  have been as exciting and dramatic  for Victor as it was for Helen Keller when she first realized that the movements made on her hand (a symbol) represented water (an object).

At first, Victor took written words such as <book> to mean a specific object, a particular book,  but eventually he learned to associate the words with  classes of objects, in this example, all books.  [Note, all words enclosed in arrow brackets < > indicate that a written word form is being described. Also, although the words are written in English, it is French spelling that is implied.]  He also went through some of the same problems of overgeneralization that ordinary children go through in learning language, classifying, for example <knife> with <razor>. He learned adjectives such as <big> and <small>, <hot> and <cold> and a variety of color 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.  (As is noted in Chapter 12, one of the authors of this book has done the same in teaching language to deaf children in the U.S. and Japan.)

Thus, in less than a year after the boy was given up as practically being an imbecile, 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 a significant extent. As far as Victor's continuing lack of speech was concerned, Itard concluded that isolation and age might have caused that particular language ability to diminish. Correct or not, this conclusion (regarding speech) anticipated by over a century modern theorizing concerning the existence of a “critical age” for language learning! Unfortunately Itard did not consider written language (as evidenced by Victor’s ability to read and write) as a language accomplishment equal to that of speech. (In Chapters 11 and 12, we argue that  language in the written or sign mode is in no way inferior to that in the speech mode.)

Itard could not explain why Victor could acquire reading and writing but not speech. Neither can we, for that matter, since whether or not Victor suffered from brain damage or a congenital brain disorder such that his speech comprehension and production were both affected is something that can never be known. Itard had none of the brain imaging devices we now have for examining the condition of the brain (see Chapter 7) and no postmortem was performed on Victor’s brain. Unfortunately, too,  Victor’s brain was not preserved, for, if it had, there would be the possibility of now examining it for abnormalities. This is not as absurd as it may seem.  Recently  a brain that had been preserved for over one hundred years, that of a language damaged patient of Broca (the eminent 19th century French neurologist), was  analyzed for abnormalities by computer imaging (Chapter 7). The results clearly confirmed Broca’s hypothesis concerning the cause of the patient’s language disorder!

Despite his success in learning written language, Victor just could  not understand nor produce speech, although he was able to get some emotional content from the tones of peoples’ voices. During the last year of the five years he devoted to  Victor, Itard tried again to teach the boy to speak. He used laborious methods which had been used with some success on deaf-mutes, using the children's sense of sight and touch to make them understand just how the vocal cords vibrate, where the tongue is placed, how the facial muscles move, etc. These attempts failed. Itard then ended his work with Victor.  This involved a number of reasons, one of them being the inability to handle the boy's emotional crises brought on by the arrival of puberty. Although Victor was moved out of the Institute in 1810, he stayed nearby in a house with Madame Guérin.  He lived there for18 years remaining mute for the rest of his life.

Victor’s case greatly interested French scholars and he  became a focal point of the philosophical debate between the followers of Descartes (who believed that humans were born with certain ideas in their minds) and the followers of John Locke (who believed that humans had no ideas in their minds at birth). (Chapter 5 considers these views and others in detail.) The Enlightenment had attempted to  extricate humankind from a purely religious or supernatural context and had sought to explain and understand human beings as part of nature. Scholars were  therefore interested in Victor's situation as a product of nature in comparison with his condition after a period of "civilizing". Itard's conclusions, couched within that philosophical framework, were very Lockeian: he pointed to Victor as evidence that we are practically "blank slates" to be written upon by our experiences in the environment and society.
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 3. GENIE — RAISED IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

The case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron may have been a case of simple child abandonment, something which was not and  still  is not uncommon in some parts of the world, especially where a child is considered in some way to be physically or mentally unfit to survive. Whatever one may feel about growing up alone in the wild, at least Victor seemed to have developed  considerable  survival skills over the time, years, no doubt,  he had spent alone. But, enforced isolation is different. There are cases of children being isolated from even the outside environment — imprisoned is often the more accurate term — by adults (usually the parents) and mistreated to such an extent that it is difficult to think and talk about it dispassionately. A girl called Genie is one such case.

Genie (not her real name) was discovered in late 1970.  She was 13 1/2 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 which held her to an infant's toilet seat. At night she was put into a restraining sleeping bag and placed in a crib which 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. She heard no human voices, according to her mother, and her only contact with another human  was when  being  fed and beaten. Other than a few pieces of plastic or paper  that she was given to play with, she had  nothing to look at, nothing to touch, nothing to do. Genie's mother who lived in the house eventually escaped taking the child  with her. It was in this way that  the case was discovered by the authorities. Later the father 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. Furthermore she had  been beaten into virtual silence and appeared to have no language. Based on information later provided by her mother, the girl had already begun to acquire language just prior to her confinement when she was 20 months of age.

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".  She could not understand a simple English sentence, however. Generally, 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 two year old, with her language displaying many of the same characteristics of two 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 “nomore” and “stoppit,” by the end of a few months she  knew the words for  hundreds of objects!  She had an intense curiosity about the names of things in the world around her. Soon she began to understand some of the language which was used in her presence. For instance when another child was asked how many balloons he had, to which he answered “two”, although he really had three. Genie  observing the exchange  gave the child another balloon. (Now he would have three so that what he had said would be true). Other incidents, too,  indicated that she was beginning to  learn to understand more than  single words. Thus, when told that a zipper was broken, without being asked to do so, she went off and got a safety pin to fix it. Also, if told to set a toy clock at a certain time, she was able to do it. At this time though, her actual speech production was still limited to naming things with single words, using stereotyped utterances such as “gettit” to indicate she wanted something, and often repeating the last word or phrase of a sentence spoken to her (if someone said “I have to go home”  she would say “home“).

Although Genie understood many things said to her, she often gave a  delayed response to simple commands. Sometimes she delayed as long as 5 or 10 minutes before carrying out a simple request to open a door, for example. However, whether this was due to the persistence of the memory of being beaten  by her father for vocalizing or due to some other cause is something which could not be determined. Her own speech nonetheless progressed to longer utterances; these often began with routine items like “give me”  and “may I have”  and her speech was generally composed of such expressions. Thus, Genie had proceeded, as most children do, from the one word  to the phrase and sentence stage. The difference is that Genie was 14 years old while ordinary children are typically around 1 or 2 years when they make this transition.

During the first five years after her liberation, Genie was cared for by an affectionate foster mother and was given much attention by concerned  researchers. Genie developed socially. She enjoyed going to  stores, walking about,  playing games and she was quite fond of music. She was attentive to the conversation around her and seemed to understand much of it. However, the quality of her speech showed little advancement; her utterances  remained simple and often ungrammatical. (The proper use of tense, the article and prepositions, for example, were absent from her speech.)  Still, she was able to convey complex meanings such when she recalled some details of her own terrible past, producing such utterances as, “Father take piece wood. Hit. Cry.”  And, she did use speech to do many of the same things that other children do, make requests, play games using words, and even tell lies.

Now, after about a year had passed since she was first discovered, Genie was evaluated again on her language abilility. She was tested,  for example, on a variety of syntactic structures such as  her understanding of simple negation, being required to 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 simple adjectives, such as  ‘big’  and ‘little’ (Point to the big circle).  She was required to place objects ‘‘in’,  ‘under’, ‘next to’, ‘behind’, etc. with respect to other objects to see if she understood the relationships expressed by prepositions. She had to distinguish singular from plural (Point to the balloons  as opposed to Point to the balloon) ,  the difference between ‘and‘ and ‘or‘ (Point to the spoon  and the pencil  versus Point to the spoon  or the pencil).  The tests included pronouns, tenses, superlatives (big, bigger, biggest), active/passive (The dog chased the boy  versus The boy was chased by the dog ), WH-questions (Who...?, What...?, Where...?, etc.) embedded sentences (The boy who is tall took the book ) and complex negations (The book that is red is not on the table) .  Great effort was made to keep non-linguistic cues such as tone of voice and facial gestures from influencing the results of the tests, although children and adults do use such cues in real-life situations.

Within the confines of the formal testing situation, Genie showed  good comprehension of negation, singular and plural, some prepositions, and comparatives and superlatives; she had difficulties with things such as disjunction (either/or), tense, and subject and object pronouns. Observation of Genie's behavioral responses in real-life situations, however,  appeared to show that Genie understood most of what people said to her, including many  of the  structures that she had trouble with in the formal testing situation.

Curtiss, in her exhaustive psycholinguistic study of  Genie, underscores the difference between results obtained on formal tests and those obtained  by watching how people behave in real-life situations. It is possible to have an incomplete comprehension of English, as Genie had, and yet be able to compensate for it, as Genie did, by using non-linguistic cues.

Also in 1971, Genie's spontaneous production of speech was observed. Some of her early one word utterances were what would really be two words in regular English, such as “stoppit.” Her early production beyond one word utterances were modifier-noun sentences like “black shoe” and “white skirt.”  She also began to use verbs such as in “tear off”, “spit out gum” ,“like powder”  and “want milk.”  She went on to longer phrases, such as “I want more soup” and some negatives such as “not wear glasses.”  Articles began to be used as 'the' in  “in the zoo,” and of 'a' in “elevator has a door.”  The prepositions ‘in’ and ‘on’ also started to appear in response to questions about location. Curtiss records complicated sentences involving embedding (sentences within sentences) appearing in 1974 and 1975: “I want you open my mouth”; “Dentist say drink water.”  Genie also regularly produced routine sentences involving “help me,”  “give me,”  “I want” and “may I.”  She could not, however,  ask WH-questions correctly, even after repeated promptings, although she regularly showed that she understood such sentences. In terms of producing various verb forms correctly, Genie showed inconsistent production of the 's'  used to mark the third person singular and the possessive in English, as well as the ‘ ed’ which marks the regular past tense of English verbs.

In spite of the  fact that her speech was often deficient in terms of word order and word forms, Genie obviously intellectually understood complex relationships and she was able to use language to express them though she could not do so grammatically. She surely knew what she meant when she said “Father take piece wood. Hit. Cry.”

Generally though Genie did not talk a great deal, mainly speaking only when spoken to  or when required to do so in a test situation.  There were no spontaneous outbursts of the language play that one finds in normal children as they learn language. Such silence, probably the after-effect of years of being beaten for making the slightest sound, produced a  much greater gap than is found in normal children between what they understand and what they say. In child language acquisition that  speech comprehension precedes production (Chapter 2), that is, children  understand speech before they can actually meaningfully use it. The gap between the two decreases as speech production progresses until children get to the point where they can say most of everything that they can understand. In Genie's case, however, the difference was and remained  enormous. For example, although she was able to figure out what many WH-questions meant, often by using non-linguistic cues, in all the time that  her speech production was studied, Genie never once spontaneously produced such a question type correctly.

There were a number of other differences in comparing Genie's language acquisition with that of normal children. Her first longer utterances, for example, were all noun phrases (of the ‘big dog’ and ‘my toy’ variety, whereas normal children will often produce utterances involving expressions which show a relationship between a subject and a verb (‘Mommy go’) and a verb and a direct object (‘want cookie’). Also Genie learned to understand as many as  200 words before she began to use one word utterances whereas most children generally will begin such production after learning about 50 words, although there is great variation in this regard.  The development of Genie's use of negatives was particularly slow, remaining unchanged for three years and never displaying the correct use of ‘do ‘ in negatives (‘He no want milk’ for ‘He doesn’t want milk’). On the other hand,  Genie did not go through the stage of overgeneralizing the lexical items in her vocabulary. This is markedly different from what ordinarily occurs in child language acquisition. (Even the Wild Boy of Aveyron did this, extending knife to include  razor. ) Perhaps this was due to her accumulating the very  large vocabulary that she did before she began to speak. A large correct vocabulary would have helped her to avoid such errors.

 Genie's  language acquisition was studied for about eight years under conditions certainly more language intensive than those which  involve   normal children.  Those who were taking care of Genie and studying her tried to teach and exposed her language more than  parents ever do with  children.  Her language ability, however, both in terms of understanding and production, remained below normal and her speech continued  to be ungrammatical.  Sentences such as “Genie bad cold live father house,” presumably to mean ‘I had a bad cold when I lived in my father's house,’ and “Genie have mama have baby grow up,”  for ‘I have a mama who has a baby who grew up‘ show that although she was able to choose the appropriate words which are involved in complex relations, she was unable to do so grammatically. Unfortunately, Genie, as with Victor, has not been able to acquire a normal level of language despite the great of amount of enlightened care and attention that she received.
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4. ISABELLE — CONFINED WITH A MUTE MOTHER

  In 1942, Marie K. Mason published an article in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders  titled "Learning to Speak After Years of Silence". This almost forgetten but important case concerns "… that  of a child, Isabelle [not her real name], who because of her imprisonment with a mute and uneducated mother, did not learn to speak until she was six and a half years old."

The mother of Isabelle had sustained a brain injury at the age of two, and as a result never developed speech. "…She could neither talk, nor read, nor write…[and]…she was totally uneducated." According to Mason, the woman "…communicated with her family by means of crude gestures of her own origination".  At the age of 22, the woman had a child (Isabelle).
"…During the period of her pregnancy, and for six and a half years after the child's birth, mother and child had apparently been locked in a room behind drawn shades." The mother finally escaped taking Isabelle with her and Isabelle’s case was brought to the attention of authorities. This lead to Isabelle's admittance at the age of 6 1/2 to the Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, in November of 1938.  Mason was Assistant Director of the Speech Clinic of the hospital and she took on the task of trying to help Isabelle, who was not only without language but without the elements of adequate socialization.

After overcoming an initial shyness, the child displayed curiosity about her environment, pointing and gesturing to objects which interested her. It was determined that although Isabelle had no speech production ability ("…she made no attempt to reproduce these concepts orally”), nonetheless “…she distinctly indicated a comprehension of their meaning."  Isabelle had readily grasped the fundamental linguistic principle that speech sounds were symbols for objects.

The child displayed normal hearing, but initial psychological tests were discouraging as to the potential for linguistic development. "...gesture was her only mode of expression…She revealed the performance of a three-year old child with complete failure on any test involving linguistic skill… The general impression was that she was wholly uneducable, and that any attempt to teach her to speak, after so long a period of silence,  would meet with failure. In spite of this, I decided to make the attempt on my own assumption that Isabelle's failure to speak was due to the six and a half years of isolation with a mute and deaf mother; that, in spite of her hearing acuity, she had either heard speech not at all or at such a distance and with such indistinctness as to have established no auditory impressions of speech or language forms."

"…Isabelle made her first attempt at vocalization one week  after my first visit to her" [emphasis added]. The child's first spoken sounds were approximations of "ball" and "car” in response to being shown a ball and a toy car and being prompted by the author through gestures to try and say the words. Subsequently, "…Isabelle's acquisition of speech seemed to pass through successive developmental changes. While it is true that her earliest vocal utterances were those of a child of a year and a half or two years, it is also true that she passed through each successive stage more rapidly than the normal child whose speech maturation begins at two or before and extends over a longer period of time."

Less than three months after Isabelle's entrance to the hospital,  Isabelle was speaking in sentences!  We find this entry in Mason's journal:
“Feb. 8, 1939: Says the following sentences voluntarily: That's my baby; I love my baby; open your eyes; close your eyes; I don't know; I don't want; that's funny; 'top [stop] it—'at's [that’s] mine (when another child attempted to take one of her toys).”

After just one year: "…Isabelle listens attentively while a story is read to her. She retells the story in her own limited vocabulary, bringing out the main points." After a year and a half a report of student teacher working with Isabelle notes that child's questions now included complex structures such as, “Why does the paste come out if one upsets the jar?” and “What did Miss Mason say when you told her I cleaned my classroom?” We find represented in these sentence WH questions with ‘do’, embedded sentences,  conditional conjoining and proper tensing!

Thus, after only 20 months, less than two years(!), Isabelle "…had progressed from her first spoken word to full length sentences…[and]… intelligent questioning.” Concluding her article, the author states: "Here is a little child now eight years old, who in a period of less than two years, has made striking social adjustments to a living and hearing world after six years in a world of silence, fear, and isolation; a child who can communicate with others in speech after six and a half years of primitive gesturing to a mute and deaf mother…" Truly this was a remarkable achievement. How different an outcome from that with Victor and Genie!

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5. HELEN — THE FAMOUS DEAF & BLIND GIRL 

Any discussion of language deprivation must include the case of Helen Keller, a person who was blind and deaf since infancy. (Mention was made of her case in Chapter 1 with regard to the issue of language and thought.) Actually Keller was born with any handicaps but, due to illness, became deaf and blind at the age of 19 months.  after a period of what was presumably normal exposure to language. Thus, before tragedy struck, she had already had experienced the initial stages of language acquisition. However, until six years later, at age 7, when Anne Sullivan  Macy was engaged by Keller’s parents to teach her language, through the sense of touch, Keller had had no language exposure.

In spite of  her seemingly overwhelming sensory handicaps, Sullivan Macy’s efforts were  successful. Keller learned language through touch and then even learned to speak; again by feel, by touching the  voice articulators (mouth, lips, vocal chords through the neck, etc.) of Sullivan Macy and other people. However, because she could not receive any auditory feedback, her own speech was not natural; she spoke in a high pitched somewhat monotone voice. She also learned to interpret and read Braille. Not only did Keller learn language but she went on to graduate from Radcliffe (Harvard University) with honors and then became an accomplished lecturer and writer mainly in the service of handicapped people.

(It is interesting to note here that Sullivan Macy was recommended to Keller’s parents to be her teacher by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Bell was an educator and researcher of the deaf as was his Scottish father before him. Not only that, but his mother and his own wife as well were deaf. Bell, therefore, was quite familiar with deafness and problems involved in deaf education.)

Keller’s autobiography, The Story Of My Life, is fascinating to read. In it she describes that dramatic moment when she learned her first word:
 “One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r". Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g"  is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment of tenderness.

“I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She 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. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool 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 something 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!…”

Although it might be argued that Keller’s success in language acquisition was beneficially affected by the relatively brief encounter she had with speech in her infancy, the fact that it took as long as it did for her to learn her first word, (to realize the essential relationship between symbol (feeling) and object (water)), along with not being exposed to language for a lengthy six year intervening period, serve to provide evidence against such a view.
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6. A CRITICAL AGE FOR FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION?

Why is it that Isabelle and Helen learned language to the full but Victor  and Genie did not? Why didn’t Victor and Genie learn more than they did, particularly considering their teachers’ dedication to their welfare and evidentally sound educational ideas? One thing is certain and that is without exposure to language, children will not acquire any language, let alone the supposed original language of human beings. Children need some form of exposure, be it in the form of speech or signs or writing, before language learning can occur.

In viewing the details of the cases of Victor,  Genie, Isabelle and Helen, we can see that at least four major factors in their cases must be considered: (1) cause of non-exposure to language, (2) occurence of prior language exposure, (3) period of non-exposure to language, and (4) extent of psychological and social deprivation.

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 language prior to his capture. It may be that for most, or all, of the estimated 11 or so years of his life in the wild, his exposure to language  and to ordinary human life had been minimal. On the other hand, he may have been exposed to language but then abandoned. This could have been because he was regarded as retarded or for some other reason. Barring the unlikelihood of his being raised by animals, someone would have raised him in infancy. Because we have no information regarding these crucial circumstances, there is no way we can determine why Victor was not able to attain full language competence in speech or written language.

Nonetheless, it is of importance to note that he progressed more in written language than in speech.  This finding suggests that  speech but not general language ability becomes impaired with age. This may be so. However, because we do not know Victor’s condition at birth (he could have suffered from a speech disorder), his case cannot be used as evidence bearing on this hypothesis. Still, while we see that exposure to written language was rather effective, it is not clear why Victor was unable to fully master this mode of communication. Certainly he never achieved Genie’s high level of speech comprehension, let alone the full levels of Isabelle and Helen.  Perhaps Victor was indeed retarded to some extent, either congenitally or due to psychological trauma.

Genie, at 13 years, was about Victor’s age (11 or 12 years) before she was exposed to language. Nevertheless, despite a lifetime of isolation, she was  able to develop a much high level of language than Victor, her achievement mainly in the area of speech comprehension. This accomplishment of Genie’s establishes that if there is a critical age for  acquiring the fundamentals of a first language, that is, grammatical structures, grammatical rules and vocabulary, the limiting age could not  be a young one. Genie was over 13 years old when she began to learn language.

That Genie’s speech production ability was faulty in terms of pronunciation and grammaticality may have some similarity with findings relating to second language acquisition (see Chapter 8)   especially pronunciation. Pronunciation involves the ability to control  certain  muscles of the body,  the articulators of speech, i.e.,  the tongue, mouth, vocal chords, etc. For most people, the ability to control the articulators in new ways generally begins to decline around  Genie’s age. Actually the fact that Genie had not used speech at all until she was 13 years old probably might have put her at a  disadvantage more than it would a second language learner of the same age. For, the second language learner would have had the benefit of exercising the articulators of speech for over a decade in using the first language. Even so, we cannot be sure that Genie’s poor speech ability was not the result of some negative psychological influence due to her mistreatment. After all, she had been punished for years just for making any sort of sound.

The language achievement of Isabelle and especially Helen contrast sharply with that 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 could not have been an important factor because Isabelle had had no such exposure. Isabelle was 6 years old, which was almost the same age at which Helen (at 7 years) began to be taught.

Obviously one of the main differences between these two girls and Victor and Genie is one of age; Victor and Genie were about twice the girls’ age before they began to be taught. It may well be that the aging of the body, particularly the brain, is the principle factor governing various aspects of the language acquisition process. Can we then conclude that the critical age for full first language learning lies somewhere between 6 or 7 years (Isabelle and Helen’s ages) and 12 and 13 years (Victor and Genie’s ages)?  Perhaps so. However, as our discussions of the Victor and Genie cases show, their poor performance may have been the result of extraneous factors. We do not know how Victor and Genie would have fared if, during their period of language deprivation,  they had not lived in social isolation nor, as in the case of Genie, had been physically and psychologically abused. What if they had been cared for and loved? After all, Helen was given special and tender care by her parents and even Isabelle, although shut away in a small room, had the love and companionship of her mother.

The perfect situation for studying the critical age problem, where  groups of children of various ages have received the best of care in everything but have been deprived only of language, has not yet occurred. Let us hope for humanity’s sake that it never does.
 

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SUGGESTED READINGS

Curtiss, S. (1977) Genie: A psycholinguistic study of a modern-day “wild child”, New York: Academic Press.

Keller, H.   (1903) The story of my life.  New York, Doubleday.

Lane, H. (1976) The wild boy of Aveyron, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.