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.[1][2][3] Hospital staff then began teaching Genie to speak General American English, and she gradually began to learn and use language. 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.[3][4][5]
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 own 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 grammar acquisition. Researchers attributed some of her abnormal expressive language to physical difficulties she faced with speech production, 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.[1][3][6]
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.[3][7][8]
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.[9][10][11] 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.[9][12] 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.[2][13][14]
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