Genie, the Feral Child: What can her Story Tell us about Human Language and the

Brain and Second Language Acquisition?

Lugsamee Nuamthanom Kimura

I was first introduced to Genie’s language development case many years ago in one
of my favorite Ph.D. courses, Psycholinguistics, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP),
where our discussion was evolving around the topic of “nature versus nurture.” More
specifically, the heated debate focused mainly on whether genetics or environment would
play a more crucial role in developing language. It was also around that time when Genie’s
story came to light again on TLC, an American pay TV channel, which captured my attention.
Her case was so touching that it kept encouraging me to find out more about lifelong child
abuse and other feral children from around the world, whose stories could be linked, one
way or another, to human language development. On the list of these cases come, for
example, Genie Wiley from USA, Oxana Malaya from Ukraine, and Vanya Yudin from Russia.
Feral children, as one may recognize, refer to children kept isolated from human
contact, mostly by their parents, from a very young age. Unfortunately, these children have
no or little experience of human care, love, and, crucially, human language. In almost
cases, they were abandoned inside their own homes or left
with animals, such as dogs and birds. As a result, when
discovered, these children were unable to speak, lacked
basic social skills, or had mental disability. Among these
cases, Genie’s story seemed to draw media and scholars’
attention most when she was found in 1970 at around the
age of 13. For twelve and a half years, Genie was mostly
Figure 1. Feral Children: The Story of Genie,
a Child Kept in Extreme Isolation

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tied to a potty chair, sitting alone days and nights in a dark room at the back of her house in
California. Sadly enough, she had to spend her childhood in total isolation.
Why does Genie’s story deeply fascinate a number of people from the seventies up
until now? The main reason is because her circumstances offer a unique opportunity to
test if a nurturing environment after the age of 12 could somehow make up for a total lack
of language before that period. That is, it is this opportunity in which linguists and
psychologists can test the language acquisition device (LAD) theory and critical period
hypothesis. On the one hand, it is believed that humans’ capability for language is innate.
We were born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to understand the
principles of language. On the other hand, just like other human behaviors, our ability to
acquire language depends largely on a critical period. This period or window of opportunity
for language acquisition lasts until the age of 12. After that, the organization of the brain
becomes set and can no longer learn and use language in a fully functional manner.
First proposed by Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), a language acquisition device (LAD) helps explain how children, when
exposed to any human language, are capable of learning
it only a few years after birth. Chomsky argued that every
child was born with an LAD that carries fundamental
rules for language. In other words, children are born with
an understanding of the rules of language; they simply
have to acquire its vocabulary (O’Grady, 2012). To
support his theory, Chomsky provided different
Figure 2. Southwestern Child Development
Commission
pieces of evidence, one of which suggested that language is basically similar across all of
humanity. For example, every language has a noun and a verb, and every language has the
ability to express ideas in either positive or negative ways. Chomsky also discovered from
his experiments that children seemed to understand that all sentences should have the
structure 'subject-verb-object' even before they could speak in full sentences.
Another well-known hypothesis is called the critical period hypothesis, which was
popularized by Eric Lenneberg, a German linguist and neurologist, in his book Biological
Foundations of Language. This hypothesis acknowledges that the ability to learn a language
is determined by a learner’s biological age. In particular, it claims that there is an ideal

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period of time for an individual to acquire a language in a linguistically rich environment, and
this period ends at puberty (Abello-Contesse, 2009). After that, further language acquisition
becomes much more challenging and requires more labored effort. This is to say that if an
individual misses the critical period, it will no longer be possible to achieve a full command
of language, especially grammatical systems. In other words, those who learn languages
before puberty will be more likely to acquire normal or native-like skills than those who
learn after this time period.
Can anyone thus imagine the condition of Genie’s language once she was discovered
after puberty? Being put into a hospital in November of 1970 at the age of 13, Genie
became a major source of research data in a longitudinal study by both linguists and
psychologists (Azieb, 2021). Over 7 years, Genie’s linguistic development was investigated
mainly by a graduate student named Susan Curtiss, now a professor of linguistics at the
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Curtiss’s abundant data revealed that Genie
was continuing to make significant progress in language acquisition over the years. However,
her speech was far from normal and characterized as being “syntactically primitive and
underdeveloped,” with the syntax of her negative sentences at the most primitive level
(e.g., ‘no book,’ instead of ‘I don’t have a book.’). Curtiss particularly pointed out that
Genie’s utterances were “grammatically uninflected and telegraphic.”
During her first few years of exposure to language input, Genie had shown great
progress in her language development, ranging from producing two-word utterances without
a verb (e.g., Mama bus), two-word utterances with a verb (e.g., teacher said), to using
negation with a noun (e.g., no school). Nonetheless, a transcript of her conversations with
Susan Curtiss suggested that Genie’s speech continued to exhibit the grammatically
uninflected and telegraphic aspects of language. At a
telegraphic stage, children at around the age of 2
basically begin to produce three- and four-word
utterances. While some will be grammatically complete
(e.g., ‘Daddy loves milk.’), others will have essential
grammatical elements missing (e.g., ‘Bobby eating
apple.’). Concerning the missing elements in ‘Bobby
eating apple,’ one could say that the article (i.e., an) and
Figure 3. Gifted Children and Language
Development

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auxiliary verb (i.e., is) were left out. During this telegraphic stage, other missing elements
may also include prepositions (e.g., in or at) and conjunctions (e.g., but or and).
The critical period hypothesis has also been extended to second language (L2)
acquisition, claiming that speakers who acquire an L2 after puberty would display a
substantial deficit in production and comprehension accuracy when compared to L2
speakers who acquire the language before the end of the proposed period. One famous
study, which has been cited as proof of the influence of age on second language acquisition,
was conducted by Johnson and Newport in 1989 (Seol,
2005). This study tries to seek evidence to test the
critical period hypothesis in second language acquisition
by assessing the differences in adult learners’ syntactic
performance. Particularly, the study examined the
acquisition of L2 syntax by non-native speakers who
began their acquisition of English at different ages
Figure 4. Is Adult Second Language Acquisition
Defective?
(between 3 and 39) on their arrival in America. The findings interestingly showed that there
was a steady decline from the age of 7 in judging grammatical and ungrammatical items.
Additionally, in line with Johnson and Newport’s work, a general agreement was
reached among researchers that older individuals were less likely to achieve a native-like
accent. In fact, many pieces of evidence appear to support this view. One of the most
cited works which focuses on L2 phonetics acquisition was carried out by Tahta, Wood, and
Lowenthal in 1981. This study explored the predictors of transfer of accent from the first
language (L1) to a second language in a group of people whose acquisition of English as a
second language had begun at different ages (from 6 to 15). The results revealed that there
was a strong effect of biological maturation on the ability to speak a second language
without transfer of accent and intonation from L1. As evidence, if L2 acquisition had begun
by 6, there was no transfer of accent. However, if L2 acquisition began after 12 to 13, there
was invariably accent transfer, usually in a strong manner.
As an applied linguist and a language teacher myself, I believe that language is in our
genes. There must be a section of the brain that is home to our innate ability to acquire
and recognize our first language. And inside this section of the brain, there must be a place
where universal grammar, which is shared by all humans, exists. An observed incidence that

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convinces me is linked to the reality that every child born with different mother tongues
normally goes through the same stages of language development: one-word/holophrastic,
two-word, and three- and four-word/telegraphic stages. For instance, during the one-word
stage, roughly between 12 to 18 months, every child will begin to speak in one-word
utterances (e.g., ‘mommy’). As the child reaches the age of around 18 months old, s/he will
produce two words in a grammatically correct order (e.g., Dan sleep = Dan is sleeping)
(Janda & Hamel, 1982, cited in Salim & Mehawesh, 2014).
Inevitably, I am also for the idea of the critical period hypothesis playing its role in
both first and second language acquisition, and this age-related factor must not be
overlooked. However, one should keep in mind that there are still other factors contributing
to success or failure of second language acquisition, including motivation, attitude, and
cognitive style (Richards, 1985, cited in Khasinah, 2014). For example, it is evident that
intrinsic motivation (e.g., behavior driven by internal rewards, such as the feelings of
competence) leads to greater success in learning a second/foreign language. Moreover, a
linguistic input perceived as interesting and comprehensible by learners can speed up the
mechanism of second language acquisition. From the lens of an applied linguist like myself,
I believe that humans not only have an innate ability to acquire the rules of language
(nature), but they also develop language skills through interactions with others and through
massive continuous exposure to comprehensible language input (nurture).

Thanks to Genie and other feral children whose stories continue to inspire language
acquisition and learning.

Acquisition is an unconscious study of a Learning is a conscious study through

References
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Azieb, S. (2021). The critical period hypothesis in second language acquisition: A review of the literature. International
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Feral Children: The Story Genie, a Child Kept in Extreme Isolation (2021). [Photograph]. Retrieved from
https://www.edubloxtutor.com/feral-children-the-story-genie-a-child-kept-in-extreme-isolation/
Gifted Childeren and Language Developemnt (2021). [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.verywellfamily.com/gifted-
children-and-language-development-1449117

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Is Adult Second Language Acquisition Defective? (2021). [Photograph]. Retrieved from
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