When was genie found

Do you think that bilingual children risk being misjudged as "slow" talkers when they are young? Author Russ Rymer argues that studies of language acquisition in children who are deaf have "provided linguists with a thousand Genies, and what's better, with Genies who have not been psychologically abused, only linguistically deprived.

Many Romanian orphans were brought to the United States in recent years and adopted by American families. Some of these children had been sequestered in cribs for many months and, like Genie, deprived of all types of stimulation. Studies of their brains indicate that certain areas simply did not develop and never would. Investigate the role of visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation on the development of the brain and on the ability of individuals to recognize stimuli.

Find out how lack of responsiveness affects the ability of an individual to form relationships with others. Sometimes pathological behavior is triggered by personal traumas. That may have been the case for Genie's father. Shortly before he began imprisoning his children and his wife, his mother had been hit by a car and killed. This incident may have sparked a personality change and his paranoia, which led to his abusive behavior toward his family members. Under the circumstances, how accountable should he be for what he did to Genie and the others?

What sorts of help should communities provide to individuals and families in which one member is acting in a way that is unhealthy for others? Where is the line between individual freedom and protecting the "larger society," which, in some instances, may just be the family?

Extension Questions for Further Investigation How do people learn to speak a language? One proposal, called the Environmentalist or Empiricist Hypothesis, holds that people learn language through their interactions with others, especially from hearing their parents speak. Another is that individuals are born with the rules for language ingrained in them. Thus, the ability to learn and use language reflects an essential feature of human design.

Individuals then just need to master the specific words of the language into which they were born. This is called the Nativist, Inatist, or Rationalist Hypothesis.

A third proposal, the Critical-Period Hypothesis, states that people must learn language within a critical period during early development if they are ever to comprehend and master the structure of language.

How would you test each of these hypotheses? Which one s make most sense with respect to Genie? What arguments or examples can you give to prove or disprove each hypothesis? When would be the best time for anyone to learn a second language?

By choosing to study Genie, an emotionally and mentally fragile child, did the researchers "doom" their research projects from the start? In the 7th century B. His specific interest was to determine which was the world's "original" language. He performed a primitive experiment. He took two infants away from their mothers at birth. He hired a shepherd to look after the babies in his hut and feed them goat's milk. He ordered the shepherd never to speak to the children. When the babies were about two years old, the shepherd reported to Psamtik that one had said "bekos.

Today, such an experiment would be considered highly unethical. What are some specific problems with such an experiment? What flaws can you find in the King's interpretation of his results? More than 50 wild children or "isolates" have been identified since the mids.

Find out more about one of these children. What happened to the child? What were the circumstances of the child's upbringing? Compare and contrast the details of the story with Genie's experiences? How does the era in which the child lived affect the ways that people reacted to the child? Despite Genie's shocking progress, she couldn't fully communicate.

When asked to create a question, she would say, "What red blue is in? Unfortunately, the National Institute of Mental Health revoked funding for Genie's treatment and research in the Fall of Because of the blurred lines between foster family and research team, no one could produce well-kept records or steadfast findings.

Alleging the research damaged Genie's recovery, her mother even sued the team and hospital for excessive testing. Genie returned to live with her mother, acquitted of all charges. But her mother soon found taking care of Genie too difficult. Genie made the rounds to foster home after foster home where she experienced abuse and harassment.

One set of foster parents severely beat Genie for vomiting. So traumatized, she returned to Children's Hospital. But she was afraid to open her mouth and regressed back to silence. Today, it's not clear what happened to Genie. Curtiss said she spent 20 years looking for her. One person, who wishes to remain anonymous, said he hired a private investigator to locate Genie.

She's in a private facility somewhere for mentally underdeveloped adults. Children in prison often spend time in isolation, too. Popular on BI. Latest Stories. Trending News. She was incontinent and mute. It appeared she never suffered from brain damage, mental disability, or autism. Therefore, the impairments and developmental delays Genie exhibited upon being assessed were the result of the isolation and deprivation she was subjected to. Researchers would never deliberately conduct deprivation experiments with people on moral grounds.

Genie soon learned basic social skills like using the toilet and dressing herself. She was fascinated by her environment and would study it intensely.

She especially enjoyed visiting places outside the hospital. She was talented at nonverbal communication, but her ability to use language did not proceed rapidly. As a result, psychologist David Rigler decided to focus the research on Genie's language acquisition. The discovery of Genie coincided with a debate about language acquisition in the scholarly community. Linguist Noam Chomsky, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed humans are born with an innate ability to develop language.

Within the first seven months after her discovery, Genie learned many new words. She had even begun to speak but only in single words. By July , Genie could put two words together and by November she could put together three. Genie never experienced such an explosion. Her speech seemed to plateau at creating two to three-word strings, despite four years of additional work and research with her. Yet, her inability to learn grammar, which Chomsky believed was key to human language, indicated that passing the critical period was detrimental to the complete acquisition of a first language.

In the early days after her discovery, she entered her first foster home with her teacher Jean Butler. Psychologist David Rigler and his wife Marilyn stepped in and fostered Genie for the next four years. Irene briefly regained custody only to find herself overwhelmed — so Genie went to another foster home, then a series of state institutions under the supervision of social workers who barred access to Curtiss and others.

Russ Rymer, a journalist who detailed the case in the s in two New Yorker articles and a book, Genie: a Scientific Tragedy , painted a bleak portrait of photographs from her 27th birthday party. Her dark hair has been hacked off raggedly at the top of her forehead, giving her the aspect of an asylum inmate. Jay Shurley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science who was at that party, and her 29th, told Rymer she was miserable, stooped and seldom made eye contact.

But a melancholy thread connects those she left behind. For the surviving scientists it is regret tinged with anguish. Curtiss, who wrote a book about Genie , and is one of the few researchers to emerge creditably from the saga, feels grief-stricken to this day.

They never let me have any contact with her. I long to see her. This took over my life, my worldview. A lot about this case left me shaken. Maybe this is cowardice — I was relieved to be able to turn away from the story. Because anytime I went into that room [where Genie grew up], it was unbearable. But Rymer discovered he could not turn away, not fully. But I had to confront how much I identified with Genie.

Being shut up, unable to express herself, I think that speaks to everyone. I think the person I was writing about was to some extent myself. Genie infiltrated his recent novel, Paris Twilight, set in France in , said Rymer. Maybe I failed him. After brushes with the law, John settled in Ohio and worked as a housepainter.

He married and had a daughter, Pamela. There would be no miracle turnaround, no happy ending. John, who had diabetes, died in Pamela, who apparently never met her aunt Genie, died in In Arab folklore, a genie is a spirit imprisoned in a bottle or oil lamp who, when freed, can grant wishes. The waif who shuffled into the world in enchanted many people in that brief, heady period after her liberation.