Linguistic development of Genie
When the circumstances of Genie, the primary victim in one of the most severe cases of abuse, neglect and social isolation on record in medical literature, first became known in early November 1970, authorities arranged for her admission to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where doctors determined that at the age of 13 years and 7 months, she had not acquired a first language. Hospital staff then began teaching Genie to speak General American English, which she gradually began to learn and use. Their efforts soon caught the attention of linguists, who saw her as an important way to gain further insight into acquisition of language skills and linguistic development. Starting in late May 1971, UCLA professor Victoria Fromkin headed a team of linguists who began a detailed case study on Genie. One of Fromkin's graduate students, Susan Curtiss, became especially involved in testing and recording Genie's linguistic development. Linguists' observations of Genie began that month, and in October of that year they began actively testing what principles of language she had acquired and was acquiring. Their studies enabled them to publish several academic works examining theories and hypotheses regarding the proposed critical period during which humans learn to understand and use language.
On broader levels Genie followed some normal patterns of young children acquiring a first language, but researchers noted many marked differences with her linguistic development. The size of her vocabulary and the speed with which she expanded it consistently outstripped anticipations, and many of the earliest words she learned and used were very different from typical first-language learners and strongly indicated that she possessed highly developed cognitive abilities. By contrast, she had far more difficulty acquiring and using grammar. She clearly mastered some basic aspects of grammar, and understood significantly more than she used in her speech, but her rate of grammar acquisition was much slower than normal. As a result, her vocabulary was consistently much more advanced and sophisticated than most people in equivalent phases of learning grammar. Researchers attributed some of her abnormal expressive language to physical difficulties she faced with speech production, resulting from her being punished for making sounds as a child, and worked very hard to improve her ability to speak. Within months of being discovered Genie developed exceptional nonverbal communication skills and became capable of using several methods of nonverbal communication to compensate for her lack of language, so researchers decided to also teach her a form of sign language.
By the time the scientists finished working with Genie, she had not fully mastered English grammar and her rate of acquisition had significantly slowed down. Linguists ultimately concluded that because Genie had not learned a first language before the critical period had ended, she was unable to fully acquire a language. Furthermore, despite the clear improvements in her conversational competence it remained very low, and the quality of her speech production remained highly atypical. While she had expanded her use of language to serve a wider range of functions, she had an unusually difficult time using it during social interactions. Tests on Genie's brain found she was acquiring language in the right hemisphere of her brain despite being right-handed, giving rise to many new hypotheses and refining existing hypotheses on cerebral lateralization and its effect on linguistic development.
Testing of Genie's language occurred until the end of 1977, but in mid-1975, when she was 18 years old, authorities placed her in a foster care setting which subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse, causing her to become afraid to speak and to rapidly begin losing her newly acquired language skills. After removal from this location in April 1977 she moved through several more placements, some of which were highly abusive, causing further regression of her language skills. In early January 1978 Genie's mother suddenly decided to prevent any further testing and scientific observations of Genie, and the very little available information on her ability to communicate since that time is exclusively from personal observations or secondary accounts of them. Nonetheless, linguists have continued analyzing Genie's language long after this time. Since the case study on Genie ended, there has been some controversy and debate among linguists about how much grammar she had acquired and for how long she had been learning new aspects of language.
Background
Genie was the last, and second surviving, of four children of parents living in Arcadia, California, and was born in 1957 without any noted complications at a normal weight and size; the following day she showed signs of Rh incompatibility and required a blood transfusion, but had no sequelae and was otherwise described as healthy. Her mother was almost entirely blind by this time, and around the time of her birth her father began to isolate himself and his family from other people. Due to treatment for a congenital hip dislocation, which required her to wear a highly restrictive Frejka splint from the age of to 11 months, she was late to walk, causing her father to decide that she was severely mentally retarded. His view intensified as she got older, and consequently he disliked her. He therefore tried not to talk to or pay attention to her and discouraged his wife and son, who was five years older than Genie, from doing so.Doctors and scientists who later worked with Genie were uncertain about most of her life from birth to 20 months. Besides her hip dislocation the few medical records from the first year of her life noted no physical or mental abnormalities, but by the age of 11 months she was falling behind in her physical development, which researchers believed was due to both malnutrition and some degree of neglect. In conversations with members of the research team that studied Genie, her mother said that as a baby Genie was not very cuddly and did not babble very much. At times she claimed that at an undetermined point Genie said some unspecified individual words, but on other occasions said that Genie never produced speech of any kind, preventing linguists from making any definitive determinations. When Genie was 20 months old, after a pickup truck struck and killed her paternal grandmother, Genie's father decided to increase the family's isolation as much as possible, and because he thought Genie was severely retarded he believed she required a higher degree of isolation than the rest of the family.
Genie spent almost all of her childhood locked alone in a bedroom with almost no environmental stimuli, where her father left her severely malnourished and almost always kept her either strapped to a child's toilet or bound inside a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized. He refused to speak to or to be around her, beating her with a plank he kept in her room if she made any sound or showed any emotion, and to discourage her from making any outward expression he would bare his teeth and bark and growl at her like a dog while scratching her. As a result, she learned not to vocalize or make noise and to remain as unexpressive as possible. On some occasions when she was hungry or seeking some kind of attention she made environmental noises, but otherwise maintained silence at all times.
Genie's father had an extremely low tolerance for any kind of noise, refusing to have a working television or radio in the house. Apart from one slightly open window Genie did not have any access to auditory stimuli outside the house, and the window was set well away from the street and other houses, so what little she heard from outside almost exclusively consisted of environmental sounds. Her father never allowed other people in the house, only permitted his wife to be in Genie's presence for a few minutes each day—and even during these times would not let her interact with Genie in any way—and forced his son to assist with carrying out his abuse while otherwise forbidding him from being with Genie. He did not let his wife or son speak, and especially not to or around Genie, so any conversations they had were out of Genie's earshot, preventing her from hearing any meaningful amount of language.
Sometime during October 1970, Genie's mother left her husband and took Genie with her. A few weeks later, on November 4, Genie's mother inadvertently entered a social services office, where a social worker observed Genie's behavior and total silence. The social worker and her supervisor brought Genie to the attention of child welfare authorities and the police, and a court order was immediately issued for Genie, who was 13 years and 7 months old, to be admitted to Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The police officer who arrested Genie's parents said that he and other authorities who interacted with Genie specifically noted that she did not speak.
Initial assessment
Immediately upon Genie's admission to Children's Hospital, Howard Hansen, who was the head of the hospital's psychiatry division and an early expert on child abuse, and David Rigler, a therapist and USC pediatrics and psychology professor who was the chief psychologist at the hospital, took direct control of her care. The following day they assigned physician James Kent, another early advocate for child abuse awareness, to be her primary therapist. Early tests placed her estimated mental age at approximately a 13-month-old level, within the range of development when the earliest phases of language acquisition begin. Audiometry tests confirmed Genie had regular hearing in both ears, doctors found no physical or mental deficiencies explaining her lack of speech, and her few existing medical records did not contain any definitive diagnoses. Based on a series of daytime observations and sleep studies that Jay Shurley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist in extreme social isolation, conducted in the first 18 months after her admission, doctors definitively ruled out the possibility that Genie was autistic or had any brain damage.From the time of Genie's admission doctors saw she clearly picked up some nonverbal information, with Kent emphasizing that she seemed very intent on looking at peoples' faces and made decent eye contact, further noting that she showed a small amount of responsiveness to it even in the absence of language. Despite this, Kent noted that she could only get across a few very basic needs, and neither made facial expressions nor used any discernible body language. When Genie was upset she would engage in silent, expressionless, self-harming tantrums until she had physically tired herself out, after which she immediately reverted to being completely non-expressive. She never cried during these outbursts—according to several firsthand accounts she could not cry at all—and if she wanted to make noise she pushed chairs or other objects. On a few occasions she responded to stimuli with a very soft, high-pitched, shrill laugh, but was otherwise completely undemonstrative.
Kent's early notes on Genie contained little linguistic information, which linguists wrote demonstrated Genie's unresponsiveness to language. Kent observed that she seemed interested in other people talking and attentively looked at the mouth of a speaker but had almost no reaction to speech. She seemed to recognize only a very few words which she always reacted to as if she heard them in isolation, and was entirely unable to respond to very basic sentences or commands without non-linguistic information. Hospital staff initially thought she understood them based on her few responses, but later determined she was reacting to accompanying nonverbal signals. She almost never tried to speak, and Kent described these efforts as, "a kind of throaty whimper." Because she had been forced to repress all vocalization during infancy and childhood her larynx and vocal tract were extremely underused and the muscles used for speech production were severely atrophied, which doctors believed made it difficult for her to control both air flow and her vocal cords.
From tapes and doctors' notes of Genie's first two months in the hospital, linguists later discerned that by January 1971 she knew her own name, the words mother and father, the four color words red, blue, green, and brown, the words no and sorry, and a few miscellaneous nouns such as jewelry box, door, and bunny. She also appeared to understand negative commands, and accordingly could discern a warning using a negation, although whether she understood them in the context of sentences was unclear. There was speculation, though no conclusive evidence, that she understood the intonation to indicate a yes or no question and that she understood imperative mood sentences based on tone of voice, but she otherwise lacked any grammar. Her active vocabulary at that time appeared to consist of just two short phrases, "stop it" and "no more", both of which she treated as individual words. Some doctors thought she may have spontaneously said a few other words or negative commands, as her very few vocalizations were extremely difficult to understand, but there was no record of them and no one could remember what they might have been. Linguists could not determine the extent of her expressive or receptive vocabulary at any point before then, and therefore did not know whether she acquired any or all of this language during the preceding two months at the hospital.
Genie's comprehension and production of these few words demonstrated that she distinguished speech from other environmental sounds and could hear individual phonemes when listening to people talking, two critical early components of language acquisition. Nonetheless, based on their observations both Children's Hospital doctors and the linguists who later worked with her concluded that she had not acquired a first language during childhood. Due to the lack of physical or mental explanations for her lack of speech, Kent and Hansen attributed it to the extreme isolation of her childhood. Kent came away from his first encounters with Genie extremely pessimistic about her prognosis on all fronts.