incidents of wild children brought up in social segregation
There have been several incidents of wild children brought up in social segregation with little or no human contact. The Story of Genie shows how she spent her childhood isolated and mistreated by her parents. Genie’s scenario was one of the first to test the critical period theory. Could a child raised in absolute denial and seclusion develop language? This essay argues that Genie’s story proves the critical theory hypothesis because of the difficulty she encountered in learning linguistic and her inability to use grammar. However, the lack of knowing the origin of her retardation contributed to failed measures to improve her condition.
Human beings require to be nurtured to mature to their full potential. Nurture enables people’s personality, behavior, and intelligence to develop. A person can grow fully but can be limited if appropriate nurture is not provided (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team, 2019). The time and care that was needed for proper growth were absent for most of Genie’s and Victor’s childhood. Thus, at their young age, they could barely speak or understand a word which Chomsky indicated is what divides human language from animal interaction and provides proof for the critical period hypothesis. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time frame for language growth, after which further development requires a lot of effort and can be hard to acquire. However, for Genie, if therapy were continued, she would have eventually developed her language skills but at a slower pace than most of her age mates.
Throughout Genie’s treatment, concerns were raised that too many experiments were conducted with little nurturing and therapy. Jeanne Butler, who was Genie’s first caretaker, alienated other researchers who he claimed were misusing Genie through daily testing and taping. However, when Genie was moved to Rigler and Marilyn’s home, she received both nurturing and therapy (FreeSpeech, 2013). This is confirmed by the fact that she went to speech therapy, studied sign language, learned to sew, iron, and draw.
After one year of treatment, Genie began putting three words together periodically. According to Cherry (2019), the usual language development stage in children is followed by the language explosion phase. At this point, children quickly learn new words and begin putting them together in different ways. Sadly, this never transpired for Genie because her language skills stayed stuck in the first stage. Even though she was able to use words, she was unable to apply grammatical rules and employ language in a significant way. At this point, her development decreased, and her acquisition of a new language stopped, supporting the concept of a critical period in language development.
The first problem that researchers faced with Genie was her mental state. Although Genie had a healthy cognitive function at birth, she later turned into a “highly abnormal adult” (Winner, 2015). It will never be known whether her retardation developed as a result of her horrific childhood or the problem had developed at birth. The fact that the researchers did not know the origin of her condition may have contributed to the lack of Genie’s improvement. If they had known the true nature of her condition, the right procedures would have been implemented, and the results would have been more fruitful.
Genie’s story was shocking and sad. Despite growing up in an inhumane environment, the worst part is how she missed out a critical period of learning language and was never able to communicate like a normal human being. It was sad to know that she later ended up in foster homes where she could not get professional help. However, the most exciting part of Genie’sGenie’s story is knowing that though it can be difficult, a wild child can be tamed and taught all there is to learn in society.
Genie’s story provides a good illustration of the critical period theory. It offers a good case study for students and scientists to learn about human development and stages of language development. It also shows how having the right diagnosis can be useful in treatment.