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, came to light 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 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's progress with learning language. 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 of the 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 all 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 with acquiring and utilizing grammar. She clearly mastered some basic aspects of grammar, and understood significantly more than she used in her own speech, but her rate of 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 utilizing several methods of nonverbal communication to compensate for her lack of language, so the scientists eventually decided to 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 vocalizations was still highly atypical. While she had expanded her use of language to serve a wider range of functions, she had an unusually difficult time utilizing it during social interactions. Tests on Genie's brain found she was acquiring language in the right hemisphere of her brain, which was highly unusual for a right-handed person, 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, her mother placed her in an institution which subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse. Due to her treatment in this location she became afraid to speak, and rapidly began 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 in her development.[9][12] In early January 1978, Genie's mother suddenly decided to prevent any further testing and scientific observations of Genie. There has been no direct scientific analysis of Genie since the end of 1977, and the very few updates on her ability to communicate are all 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]
Background
Genie was the last, and second surviving, of four children of parents living in Arcadia, California. She was born in 1957 without any noted complications at a normal, healthy weight and size. Around the time of her birth, her father began to isolate himself and his family from other people. Genie had a congenital hip dislocation, discovered at the age of 3 months, that caused her to be late to walk, and based on this her father decided that she was severely mentally retarded and therefore did not like her.[15][16][17] He tried not to talk to or pay attention to her and discouraged his wife and son, who was around five years older than Genie, from doing so.[15]
Doctors and scientists who worked with Genie were uncertain about most of her life from birth to 20 months. Her mother said that as a baby Genie was not very cuddly and did not babble very much. During the first year of Genie's life she began to fall behind in her physical development, which researchers believed was a sign that she most likely suffered from both malnutrition and some degree of neglect. although doctors who examined Genie during this time did not note any mental abnormalities [4][18] At times Genie's mother claimed that at an undetermined point Genie began to say some unspecified individual words, but on other occasions said that Genie had never produced speech of any kind, preventing linguists from making any definitive determinations. Some, although not all, of the people who studied Genie thought it possible that she may have learned some early language before losing it due to her subsequent isolation.[4][18]
At the age of 14 months Genie came down with a fever and the pediatrician who examined her said that, although her illness prevented him from making a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she could be mentally retarded and have the brain dysfunction kernicterus.[15][19] Her father took this opinion to mean she was severely retarded. 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. Because he thought Genie was severely retarded he believed she required additional isolation, so from that time until Genie reached the age of 13 years, 7 months, he imprisoned Genie in one room of their house.[15][4]
Genie spent almost all of her childhood locked alone in a bedroom with almost no environmental stimuli, severely malnourished and either strapped to a child's toilet or bound inside a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized.[4][20] Her father refused to speak to or around Genie, and if she made any kind of sound or showed any emotion he would beat her or force her brother to do so. To further discourage her from making any outward expression her father would bare his teeth and bark and growl at her like a wild dog, teaching her not to vocalize or make noise and to give as little outward expression as possible. On occasions when she was either hungry or seeking some kind of attention she made environmental noises, but otherwise maintained silence at all times.[21]
Genie's father had an extremely low tolerance for any kind of noise, to the point of 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 would have been able to hear were almost exclusively non-language environmental sounds.[21][22] Her father never allowed other people to come to the house, forbade any interaction between Genie and her mother, and forced his son to assist with carrying out his abuse while otherwise preventing him from being in Genie's presence.[2][23] He did not permit them to speak, and especially not to or around Genie, so any conversations they had were out of Genie's earshot and did not give her the opportunity to hear any meaningful amount of language.[4][21]
At an unspecified point Genie's father promised his wife that he would allow her to seek treatment for Genie if she lived to the age of 12, but he reneged when she reached 12 and her mother took no action for another year. Sometime during October 1970, Genie's mother left her husband and took Genie with her.[23][24] A few weeks later, on November 4, Genie's mother inadvertently entered the local 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.[2][9] The police officer who arrested Genie's parents said that he and other authorities who interacted with Genie had specifically noted that she did not speak at all.[2][11][25]
Initial assessment
Immediately upon Genie's admission to Children's Hospital Howard Hansen, who was then 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. During the doctors' earliest examinations of Genie they uncovered a wide array of physical and mental deficiencies but did not find any which explained her lack of speech, nor did they find any definitive diagnoses in her few existing medical records.[4][26][27] Doctors only gained limited information from the police investigation and their conversations and therapy sessions over the following years with Genie's mother, and even by the end of the case study on Genie the scientists remained uncertain about much of her early life.[11][13][28]
At first, Children's Hospital staff could not be completely sure whether Genie had no language or if she was only selectively mute.[4] Doctors concluded that Genie's estimated mental age was at approximately the level of a 13-month-old, putting her within the range of development when the earliest phases of language acquisition typically begin and leading to some hope that Genie might know some language or still be able to learn to speak.[29] Genie's brain was completely physically intact, and doctors found no physiological or neurological disorders preventing her from speaking. 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 on Genie, doctors definitively ruled out brain damage or autism as causes for her lack of speech.[4][30][31]
During the first examinations of Genie doctors saw that she was clearly picking up some nonverbal information, with Kent emphasizing that from the outset she seemed very intent on looking at peoples' faces and made decent eye contact from other people and 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, all through nonverbal communication, and that she neither made facial expressions nor used any discernible body language.[4][32][33] When Genie was upset she would engage in silent, expressionless, self-harming tantrums until she had physically tired herself out. She never cried during these outbursts—according to several firsthand accounts at that time she could not cry at all—and if she wanted to make noise she would push chairs or other similar objects. As soon as she was finished, she would immediately revert to being completely non-expressive. On a few other occasions she responded to stimuli with a very soft, high-pitched, shrill laugh, but was otherwise completely undemonstrative in her demeanor.[4][32][33]
Despite audiometry tests confirming that she had regular hearing in both ears, doctors wrote she had almost no reaction to speech. Kent's documentation of his visits with Genie in the first two months after her admission to Children's Hospital only rarely contained linguistic information, including only one such observation from the entire month of November, which linguists wrote had demonstrated how little Genie responded to language during this time. She seemed to recognize only a very few words, and always responded to them as if they were spoken in isolation regardless of any additional linguistic information. Children's Hospital staff initially thought the few responses she did give meant she understood their words, but later determined that she was reacting to their accompanying nonverbal signals. Even when she was obviously interested in other people talking around her she only reacted if she could pick up other nonverbal information, and without non-linguistic information she could not respond to very basic sentences or commands. She almost never made any attempt to speak, and on the rare occasions that she vocalized Kent described the sounds she made as, "a kind of throaty whimper."[4][34]
From tapes taken during Genie's first two months in the hospital, linguists later discerned that by January 1971 Genie's responses to other peoples' speech showed comprehension of approximately 15–20 individual words. She evidently 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 when someone was giving her a warning using a negation, although whether she understood them in the context of sentences was unclear.[lower-alpha 1][35][36] There was also some speculation, though no conclusive evidence, that she understood the intonation to indicate a question in a yes-or-no context and that she understood imperative mood sentences based on tone of voice. Otherwise, she showed no understanding of any grammar whatsoever.[4][29]
Genie's active vocabulary, at that time, appeared to consist of just two short phrases, "stop it" and "no more". 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 due to her abnormal voice and pronunciation. There was no record of these, however, 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 had acquired any or all of this language during the preceding two months at the hospital.[4][29]
Genie's comprehension and production of these few words demonstrated to doctors 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. Because there were no mental or physiological explanations for Genie's inability to learn a language, Kent and Hansen attributed her lack of speech to the extreme isolation of her childhood.[4][29] Kent ultimately came away from his first encounters with Genie extremely pessimistic about her prognosis on all fronts.[34][27]
Early communication progress
Children's Hospital staff did not keep detailed records of Genie's early linguistic progress, and she only rarely spoke during this time, and as a result there was little data on Genie's language for the first 6 months of her stay.[37][29] When James Kent met with Genie for the first time he initially observed no visible reactions from her, but upon taking several objects out of a bag he found that she seemed afraid of a small puppet. When she threw it on the floor Kent pretended to be concerned and said, "We have to get him back", and Genie startled him when she repeated the word "back" and nervously laughed.[4][38] When they subsequently began to play with the puppet she repeated "back" several times, and when Kent said, "The puppet will fall" she repeated the word "fall". Apart from her tantrums, the times she played with these puppets accounted for most of the few times she made any outward expression during the early part of her stay.[4]
Within weeks of being admitted to Children's Hospital Genie became much more responsive to nonverbal stimuli, although at first her own demeanor remained devoid of nonverbal signals. During the first months that she lived at the hospital, she gradually began to express more of her emotions outward.[4][39] Jay Shurley recalled that when he first met Genie, in December 1970, she did not say anything to him but immediately connected with him in a way that he could not explain.[9] After a fairly short time, Genie's nonverbal communication skills became exceptional. Everyone who worked with her said she had an indescribable way of eliciting emotions, and she seemed able to communicate her desires without talking.[40][41]
Genie's early acquisition of vocabulary, both receptive and expressive, was initially slow, although from the outset people observing her believed that her linguistic performance was significantly behind her true linguistic competence. In his early sessions Kent saw that Genie seemed very interested in watching other people talk, and often intently looked at the mouth of a speaker. Within a month she was far more responsive to other people talking, but doctors were unsure whether she was responding more to verbal or nonverbal stimuli.[4][42] After a month at Children's Hospital Genie started attempting to mimic some speech sounds, although her imitations were very infrequent. She was also beginning to draw a distinction between individual people around this time, and began to tailor her expressions and responses according to the person with whom she was interacting. Hospital staff saw she enjoyed intentionally dropping or destroying small objects and heard her repeatedly saying "stopit" to herself and shrilly laughing while doing so, indicating to them that "stopit" was a phrase of ritual play for her.[43][44]
Even at this phase, Genie distinguished the names of similar objects even if they were unfamiliar; scientists noted that she quickly drew the distinction between a pen and a marker, and did not mistake one for the other.[45][46] At the same time she never overgeneralized words for individual objects, such as using the word ball to describe any round object. For something unfamiliar, she always sought the correct word or phrase instead of attempting to apply a word from her existing vocabulary; when she first recognized the difference between a pen and a pencil, she learned the words for each. She could also determine the names of objects based on their uses, as her early distinction between a straight pin and a safety pin evidenced.[5][8][47]
Psychologists Jack Block and Jeanne Block evaluated Genie in February 1971 and put her language below the two-year-old level on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. Within the next month Genie's vocabulary acquisition began to accelerate at a progressively more rapid pace, and by March 1971 she was learning new words far faster than any of the hospital doctors had anticipated.[4][48] Observers noted that she seemed to know far more words than she would spontaneously say, but could not be sure about the extent of either her receptive or expressive vocabulary because she was so responsive to nonverbal stimuli.[5] Her active vocabulary was over 100 words, and doctors saw she clearly understood many words which she did not say herself.[4][49]
After another month, Genie began spontaneously producing one-word utterances and began to understand increasingly complex sentences.[4][49][50] Soon after this time she appeared to understand some basic elements of the give-and-take nature of conversation, and without prompting could provide non-imitative one-word responses to statements or questions. When a minor earthquake frightened her in April she rapidly verbalized to some hospital cooks she had befriended, marking the first time anyone had seen her so willing to speak.[51][52] Around the same time Kent noted the first recorded instance of Genie expressing anger through actions directed at someone else instead of self-harming behavior, although she did not entirely stop attacking herself when upset.[53]
By May 1971, most of Genie's vocabulary consisted of words for colors, the numbers 1 through 5, the word "mama" and a few peoples' names, the verbs "stop it" and "spit", and a large number of miscellaneous nouns such as "people" and "doctor".[5][54] She also knew a few compound verbs, such as put back, although linguists concluded that she was almost certainly treating them as single words in her vocabulary. In addition, she had learned few stative verbs and reportedly did so within the typical time frame of language acquisition. To linguists who later evaluated her, the contrast between her vocabulary and that of most young children at this stage of language learning was already becoming apparent. Children's vocabulary primarily consists of nouns and a few particles, but Genie's early lexicon contained almost as many adjectives and verbs as nouns.[5][55]
One day in May 1971 when Genie was with Jean Butler, her teacher at the hospital, Butler asked a boy holding two balloons how many balloons he had. When the boy said "three", Butler said Genie appeared startled and quickly gave him another balloon. To Butler and the other hospital staff, this demonstrated Genie was listening to other people and that she understood significantly more language than she produced.[9][56] A few weeks later Genie showed comprehension of simple commands, appropriately responding when Butler said to her, "Scrub them [some pans] with the brush".[57] Doctors reported that Genie frequently said "No", despite clearly not intending to give a negative response.[58] During the latter part of her stay at Children's Hospital Genie also used language, as well as other behavior, to get people at the hospital to do things for her, and by the end of her stay she was reportedly very good at getting what she wanted from hospital staff.[59]
At this phase of language acquisition, most children use individual words to either put a name to something or to comment on the fact that something exists. By contrast, Genie seemed to use entire phrases for this purpose. Unless specifically asked to, she would never use single words as labels.[60] Before she began forming two-word sentences she could both ask for something and associate an object with someone, which was normal. Unlike young children, however, she could also ask about memories or future events which had previously been mentioned.[8]
Throughout Genie's stay at Children's Hospital her voice was completely monotonic and extremely high-pitched, far above the normal range of children who are first learning to speak. At first, it was so high that it did not register on acoustic instruments researchers attempted to use for voice analysis. Her speech was also very soft, and doctors wrote that many of her earliest imitations of speech completely silent while others were so quiet that they sounded like whispers.[4][61][62] People who worked with her believed this was because, while most people master pitch modulation even before learning any individual words and use a wide variety of pitches and intonations while still babbling, Genie had been forced to repress all vocalization during her infancy and childhood. As a result, her larynx and vocal tract were extremely underused and the muscles used for speech production were severely atrophied, making it difficult for her to control both air flow and her vocal chords and leaving her completely unable to modulate the pitch or volume of her voice.[5][63][64]
Throughout 1971 Genie's voice was extremely glottalized, and when she spoke she frequently pronounced only a few sounds; for instance, the word "doctor" sounded more like "dert".[4][65][66] Even though she knew how to ask questions, due to her inability to control her voiceshe had to use facial expressions to indicate a question. Like young children, most of Genie's first words were monosyllabic consonant-vowel-(consonant) sequences; the consonants were usually an unaspirated labial or dental stop, and the vowels were monophthongs. But while most peoples' first disyllabic words also follow this pattern, hers had both consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant sequences.[5]
Despite the lack of variability in her own voice, Genie clearly understood different tones of voice in other peoples' speech.[5] Unusually for someone in such an early phase of learning a first language, from the very first disyllabic words Genie more fully articulated Curtiss noted that, except when referring to herself by her (real) name, she immediately demonstrated proper stress patterns in her speech. For around two years the length of time she held out a vowel was initially the only stress indicator she used, and until she incorporated other stress indicators into her speech the length of a stressed vowel was very exaggerated. People unfamiliar with her speech said she sounded either like a deaf child or someone with cerebral palsy, although trained speech pathologists only said the latter.[67]
Early observations
In December 1970 David Rigler procured a small grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to conduct preliminary studies on Genie, and began planning to carry out more detailed research. In May 1971, Rigler headed a team of doctors and scientists who sought and obtained a three-year grant from the NIMH to carry out a full case study on her.[9][68] The primary focus of their research was to test the hypothesis of Eric Lenneberg that humans have a critical period for language acquisition, the end of which he defined as the onset of puberty, and the innateness hypothesis of Noam Chomsky which contended that the ability to learn language is instinctive in humans and is what separates humans from all other animals. UCLA linguistics professor Victoria Fromkin headed linguistic evaluation, and organized a group of linguists to design and carry out their study.[69][70]
Soon after the research team received approval for the grant, in late May, Susan Curtiss began her work on Genie's case as a graduate student in linguistics under Fromkin. As Genie had already been learning language for 6 months, Curtiss felt she had started working with Genie somewhat later than ideal in her language acquisition process.[71] Linguists used videos and transcripts Children's Hospital staff had taken to piece together what they could of Genie's early linguistic development, but the relative lack of information left some ambiguities regarding the exact rate and trajectory of her early vocabulary and grammar acquisition.[72] Curtiss and Fromkin quickly decided that Genie's linguistic abilities were not yet at a usefully testable level, so Curtiss decided to devote the first months of her work to observing Genie's language in everyday situations; for the remainder of Genie's stay at Children's Hospital, Curtiss met with her almost every day. During this time she and Fromkin realized existing linguistic tests would not yield meaningful results, so they designed a set of 26 new tests from which they extrapolated most of their data.[5][54] Curtiss also wrote down every spontaneous utterance she heard Genie make, recording approximately a few thousand by the time she completed her dissertation.[7][73]
Curtiss saw that Genie could name most of the things around her, and believed that at that time her vocabulary was at least a few hundred words. In addition to a few verbs and adjectives, she knew a large number of nouns for various objects. She was also extremely eager to expand it, frequently grabbing Curtiss' hand and pointing it towards objects for which she wanted to know the word; if Curtiss could not figure out exactly what Genie was looking for, Genie refused to let go until she learned at least one new word. She seemed particularly eager to learn the words for colors, and would express disappointment if Curtiss could not give a specific name for a color. By this time Genie had also clearly learned some basic principles of grammar, and understood more than she was producing.[9][74][75] Curtiss quickly recognized Genie's powerful nonverbal communication abilities, remembering that she and Kent frequently encountered complete strangers who had bought one of her favorite objects for her because, even though she had not said anything, they sensed she wanted it.[9][76][77]
Very early during her work Curtiss noted Genie's focus on objective properties, such as color, size, and shape, was very unusual, as these require a fairly high level of cognitive sophistication which is not present in young children. Upon learning the words for shapes, she had no difficulty distinguishing between basic shapes such as a square and circle. Her ability to name a wide variety of colors was of particular interest to linguists, as previous studies had found this faculty was often absent in children at the age of 4 whose language acquisition was impaired.[60][78] This suggested to linguists and psychologists doctors that, prior to her being discovered, she had already developed mental mechanisms for categorization.[8][60]
On one trip in June 1971, Genie heard Curtiss and Kent talking about stuffed animals of different sizes; she imitated the words "big" and "small", and a few minutes later appropriately used the word "big" when describing a ball. On another trip around the same time, when they visited a house someone asked her if she wanted to see a cat. Genie, who had an intense fear of cats and dogs, responded by saying, "No. No. Cat." and forcefully nodding.[79] Around this time Genie began to use her first words with two morphemes and constructed her earliest two-word sentences, all of which were modifier-noun or noun-noun attributive constructions such as, "More soup" or, "Genie purse". A short time later, she began to produce noun-predicate adjective sentences such as "Dave sick".[4][8] By contrast, most of the first two-word utterances of young children are equational sentences such as, "That's mine"; no one recorded Genie using any two-word sentences of this kind.[80] In addition, while most children start forming two-word sentences with a few core words, which they then attach to other words, Curtiss never observed Genie doing this.[5]
First foster home
In late June 1971 Genie moved into Jean Butler's home, where she stayed until early August. Butler was childless, and at the time lived alone. Soon after moving in with Butler Genie, who had turned 14 while living at the hospital, showed the first signs of reaching puberty, definitively putting her past Lenneberg's proposed critical period.[81][82] During Genie's stay, Butler increasingly limited contact with Children's Hospital doctors and the research team.[9][83] However, Butler filmed Genie and wrote about both her developmental and language progress in her personal journal.[84]
The only linguistic information anyone besides Butler provided on Genie's language during this time was that Genie formed some non-imitative two-word utterances in July, all without verbs and in noun phrase–noun phrase form, and that Genie gave her first noted imitations of a few unspecified three-word utterances.[85] Butler claimed in her journal that Genie had become far more verbal soon after moving in with her, and wrote she had taught Genie to say "yes" to other people, to use negative forms of words, and to express her anger through words or by hitting objects. Around a month into Genie's stay Butler said Genie had argued with her and used negatives in her protestations, which in addition to being the first report of Genie using negative forms in a sentence was also the first time anyone recorded Genie expressing disagreement in language.[86] In a letter to Jay Shurley from early August Butler told him that Genie was regularly talking in two-word sentences and sometimes produced three-word utterances containing two adjacent adjectives to describe nouns, giving the utterance "one black kitty" as an example of the latter, and claimed that in a recent conversation Genie had made extensive use of negative words and sentences. Butler also reported that a few days prior, when she asked Genie why she had thrown her new pet goldfish outside, Genie explained, "bad orange fish—no eat—bad fish"—which would have been by far her longest utterance to that point.[lower-alpha 2][86]
August 1971–mid-1975
In mid-August 1971, authorities removed Genie from Butler's house and returned her to Children's Hospital. Later the same day they transferred her to David Rigler's home, where she ultimately stayed for approximately four years. The Riglers had three adolescent children of their own, one of whom left for college shortly after Genie arrived. While living with them Rigler's wife, Marilyn, became Genie's teacher; Marilyn had graduate training as a social worker and had just completed a graduate degree in human development, and had previously worked in both nursery schools and Head Start Programs.[9][13][87] The Riglers gave the rest of the scientific team surrounding Genie far more access to her, and linguists immediately resumed detailed observations.[4][5][88]
Brain exams
As early as January 1971 doctors had begun to administer a series of neurolinguistic tests on Genie, making her the first language-deprived child to undergo any detailed brain examinations. From multiple tests and observations of her performing everyday activities scientists concluded that she was right-handed, and based on their early tests doctors suspected Genie's brain was extremely right-hemisphere dominant.[5][89] In early March 1971 neuroscientists Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima administered a series of dichotic listening tests, and found that her non-language results were normal for a right-handed person but that she responded with 100% accuracy for language sounds her left ear while correctly answering at only a chance level for her right ear. Prior tests had only found such an extreme discrepancy in split-brain patients or people who had undergone a left hemispherectomy as an adult.[5][89][90]
Due to Bellugi and Klima's findings, starting in the fall of 1971 scientists at UCLA under the direction of Victoria Fromkin, Susan Curtiss, and Stephen Krashen—who was then also a graduate student in linguistics studying under Fromkin—gave Genie a series of tests on her brain functions. They continued the dichotic listening tests and found that her results remained the same for both non-language and language stimuli in each ear.[5][89][90] In addition, they administered a series of tachistoscopic and evoked response tests to measure a variety of her brain functions.[89][91] On tests specifically geared towards measuring Genie's language acquisition, her results were congruous with adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients. On a one evoked response test Genie had no difficulty giving the correct meaning of sentences using familiar homophones, such as "I sock Bobo" and "The sock is red".[6][92] This demonstrated that, similar to these patients, her receptive language comprehension was significantly better than her expressive comprehension. In addition, on a tachistoscopic test in 1975 Genie had little difficulty when asked to point to words which rhyme, which was analogous to results from these patients.[93][94]
When the scientists monitored Genie's responses on their language tests with an EEG, they consistently picked up more activity from the two electrodes placed over her right hemisphere than they did from those over the normal locations of the Broca's area and Wernicke's area in a right-handed person. In particular, they found a high level of involvement from her right anterior cerebral cortex.[6][95][96] Based on these results the concluded that Genie's brain had completed lateralization and that, because Genie's language center lacked stimulation when she was a child, it had atrophied and her language functions had instead lateralized to her right hemisphere. Her results on their non-language tests suggested to them that her hemispheric dominance was not simply reversed.[5][6][89] They believed that Genie had been developing as a normal right-handed person until the time her father began isolating her, and attributed the extreme imbalance between Genie's left and right hemispheres to the fact that Genie's sensory stimulation as a child was almost exclusively visual and tactile.[4][6]
Prior to Genie's case, there had been some observations of right-hemisphere language acquisition in adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients. These studies had consistently shown they were much better at learning vocabulary, although they were able to learn some basic grammar. After determining that Genie was learning language in her right hemisphere, the scientists monitored her linguistic abilities compared to these patients.[6][97][89] Linguists noted the split brain and left hemispherectomy subjects had an advantage over Genie because, unlike her, their right hemispheres had already acquired at least a small amount of basic language.[4][5][6]
Before testing
When Genie first moved in with the Riglers, the people who worked with her wrote that she infrequently spoke and that her speech was much more halting and hesitant than Butler had described. Despite Butler's claims that she had taught Genie to express her anger in language, the Riglers saw that Genie would still scratch and cut herself when angry. In addition, for reasons they could not discern Genie's responses were almost always several minutes delayed. She did not usually seem to listen to anyone unless she was being directly addressed and typically walked away from somebody who was speaking to her, and while she would stay with someone if specifically asked she rarely seemed attuned to what the person was saying.[4][98][99] In contrast to Butler's writings the scientists wrote that Genie only rarely used two-word sentences, which prior to October 1971 were all modifier-noun sentences, sentences indicating possession—none containing the possessive 's marker—or the two words of a compound noun such as "number five". For the first few months after moving in with the Riglers linguists did not record any utterances longer than two words, and wrote that she did not use any negative sentences.[4][98][99]
To counter Genie's self-harming behavior, Marilyn first taught Genie to take her frustration out on inanimate objects in their yard. Later during her stay, when Marilyn saw Genie was getting angry she would say, "You are upset. You are having a rough time". Genie gradually began to respond, "rough time", and eventually only needed to hear Marilyn say, "You are upset" before responding, "Rough time."[9][100] As she learned more language, she began to gain more control over her responses to situations that upset her.[101] By the end of her stay with the Riglers, she could gesture to indicate her level of anger; depending on whether she was very angry or merely frustrated, she would either vigorously shake one finger or loosely wave her hand.[9][102]
In an effort to improve her ability to interact with other people Curtiss began reading some children's stories to Genie, and at first she found that even when Genie was willing to sit with her she did not seem to be engaged with what Curtiss was saying. After several weeks, in mid-October 1971, Curtiss was reading Genie a story when she saw Genie was clearly listening and responding to her speech. After that point, Genie paid attention to people even when they were not speaking directly to or about her.[103][104] As she settled down with the Riglers she began to talk somewhat more, and her response time also began to improve, but she continued to speak significantly less than most children in similar phases of language learning.[63][105]
During this time the scientists first observed that unlike young children, who regularly experiment with using grammatical structures before fully understanding how to incorporate them into their speech, Genie would never use any piece of grammar before complete comprehension.[106] Furthermore, whereas children typically begin to use two-word phrases when they have a vocabulary of about 50 words, Genie only began to do so after she could use and understand about 200, which matched the timeline observed in children with various types of aphasia.[4] The scientists noticed that while children's early speech is normally excessively specific, frequently containing overly marked words such as "tooked", Genie never exhibited this.[47] Curtiss also noted that when Genie learned the word dog she used it to describe any dog but never used it when describing any other animal, indicating she also understood how to use generic terms, and that upon learning the name of the Riglers' dog Genie recognized that the name was specific to him.[5] In a review of Curtiss' dissertation, language psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow suggested the lack of overgeneralization may have been due to differences between the mind of a young child versus an adolescent as opposed to the properties of early language acquisition.[107]
Although Genie initially did not use any negative forms she soon began to show comprehension of them, albeit much more accurately and consistently with expressions using the word not (regardless of whether the speaker used the word not in its full form or as part of a contraction containing n't) than the prefix un.[5] Instead of learning negatives through the three-step process which linguists believed young children did, she appeared to have gained comprehension of every kind of negation at once. When tested on negative sentences between November 1971 and June 1973, Genie responded with 100% accuracy.[108] The ability to tell affirmative and negative sentences apart had previously been observed in split-brain and adult left-hemispherectomy patients.[6] In September and October 1971 she began incorporating verbs into her two-word utterances, such as, "Dave hurt", although at first she never included the first person subject and inconsistently included any subject.[4][5] During this time Curtiss also noted that Genie never confused gender in her speech, although she never used pronouns to mark gender and only marked it through gender-specific nouns.[109]
Although Genie's two-word sentences contained many of the same syntactical properties as those of young children, she was much better at labeling and describing emotions and concrete objects, especially colors, sizes, and qualities. Two of her early adjectives were "funny" and "silly", and most of her earliest two-word sentences modified nouns, such as "yellow balloon" and "lot bread". Taken with her distinction between general and subordinate terms, this strongly indicated a focus on physical characteristics to a degree not normally found in children, who are typically better at describing relationships.[107][110][111] Genie also had significantly more action verbs than normal in her early vocabulary.[112][8][109]
During testing
Active testing of Genie's language began in October 1971, when Curtiss and Fromkin decided her linguistic abilities had advanced to the point where they would yield usable results, and continued until the end of 1977. Curtiss conducted the tests herself once a week almost every week, and conducted the primary analysis of the results. She and Fromkin designed their tests to measure both Genie's vocabulary and her acquisition of various aspects of grammar, including syntax, phonology, and morphology. The scientists considered her progress with language to be a substantial part of their larger goal of helping to successfully integrate her into society, so although they wanted to observe what language Genie could acquire on her own, out of a sense of obligation they sometimes stepped in to assist her.[4][5][113]
Linguists used the tests Curtiss and Fromkin designed as their primary method of measuring Genie's language, although they also incorporated a few existing tests, including the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, into their exams. For each aspect of grammar on which the scientists tested Genie they created multiple sentences to gauge her proficiency and, because Genie was so responsive to nonverbal cues, they eliminated them as much as possible. To ensure their results reflected long-term progress Curtiss conducted each of the individual tests at approximately one month intervals, and to prevent Genie from simply memorizing responses to certain words they would not use the same word in two sentences to test any one aspect of her language.[4][5] The earliest tests they administered were deliberately short, only looking for six to eight responses per test, and over the course of testing Curtiss and Fromkin gradually increased their duration. Most of the tests only required Genie to point, which the scientists thought would be easiest for her, and for several tests they had her point to or arrange words and letters written on cards.[lower-alpha 3][5][114]
When Curtiss first started testing Genie she found that although Genie usually did not actively resist she never initiated tests and seemed only to do the absolute least amount required, which Curtiss later attributed to Genie simply being lazy. Curtiss wrote that the first year of testing was extremely difficult, as she had a very hard time keeping Genie's attention and getting her to respond.[115] As Curtiss continued Genie grew to largely enjoy being tested and became much more willing to participate, though she sometimes playfully gave deliberately wrong answers, and on some occasions would even indicate that she wanted to take the tests. Even later during her testing Curtiss sometimes struggled to get Genie to cooperate and wrote that Genie continued to do less than she was capable of, preventing the scientists from being completely certain about her results, but wrote Genie usually put in more effort and that she could typically anticipate Genie's level of engagement on a given day.[5][116][117]
1971–1973: Early testing
| Utterance | Date | Notes | Curtiss' gloss (if any) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dave hurt. | October 1971 | Subject-verb | N/A |
| Stocking white. | November 1971 | Noun-predicate | N/A |
| Mark mouth hurt. | November 1971 | Three-word sentence | N/A |
| Play kitchen. | February 1972 | Locative sentence | Play in kitchen. |
| Cow tongue meat. | July 1972 | Complex noun phrase | A cow's tongue is meat. |
| Want go shopping. | July 1972 | Expanded verb phrase | N/A |
| No more father. | July 1972 | Stage One negative sentence | N/A |
| Want go walk Ralph. | October 1972 | Complex noun phrase, more complex verb phrase | I want to walk to Ralph's. |
| Get out baby buggy! | Early 1973 | Vocative case | N/A |
| Judy my finger caught door. | February 1973 | Complex sentence | Judy caught her finger in the door. |
Upon commencing her tests Curtiss found that although Genie's comprehension was clearly ahead of her production, it was only slightly ahead.[4][118] By this time, Genie had begun to diversify her two-word utterances to include sentences in either subject-verb or verb-object order, which they suggested meant Genie was grasping the subject–verb–object sentence structure typically used in English. She could follow other word order rules as well, as evidenced in her verb-complement sentences.[5][107][85] At the very beginning of Curtiss' testing, word order was the only non-vocabulary aspect of language Genie could utilize in her utterances.[119]
Tests administered in October 1971 showed that while Genie did not use the plural forms of words and could not distinguish between plural and singular words or inflections, she clearly knew the difference between one versus more than one object and understood numbers and quantitative descriptors such as "many" or "lots of".[5][85] Soon after testing began Genie also started using some regular past tense forms of weak verbs, correctly using the bound morpheme and suffix -ed. It would be considerably longer before she utilized the past tense of either irregular past tense verbs, such as to go, or strong verbs, such as to give or to break. Researchers only observed her using these, either in imitation or spontaneous speech, in 1973, and her spontaneous production of them remained limited.[5][120] On tests, however, Curtiss noted that Genie consistently recognized and correctly responded to the conjugations of strong and irregular past tense verbs at a considerably higher rate than she did regular weak verbs.[121]
In 1972 Fromkin said that by November 1971 Genie's speech was, "strictly rule-governed", and that her grammar was similar to a typical 18- to 20-month-old.[122] In November 1971 Genie began forming noun-predicate two-word utterances, such as "stocking white". Genie had also begun using the genitive case in her early two-word sentences around this time, with many of these sentences, such as "Marilyn bike", indicating possession. Linguists noted that, in all of these possessive sentences, she entirely relied on word order.[4][5] During the same time the scientists also started testing Genie's knowledge of sentences containing modifiers for properties such as size, shape, and color, and for the first two months Genie only gave a correct response 62% of the time.[4][5]
November 1971 was also the time that Genie produced her very first spontaneous three- to four-word utterances, although they were extremely uncommon at this point. These utterances were all either modifier–noun sentences such as "little white clear box", subject–verb–object sentences in noun–verb–noun form such as "Tori chew glove", or verb–noun phrase sentences, further convincing the scientists that Genie understood English word order.[4] Some of them, such as "Small two cup", clearly demonstrated that she was not simply imitating other people.[123] Although the scientists saw this as a major sign of progress, they noted that, whereas most children take around four to six weeks to progress beyond the two-word sentence stage, Genie had not done so for five months.[5][124][125] Some of Genie's utterances from this time until the end of 1973, such as "Elevator hurt silly goose", were so unintelligible that Curtiss termed them "nonsentences", although she believed Genie intended to communicate something through them. A few of these, such as "Angry burn stove", were a type of subject–subject–subject sentence which linguists had previously observed in children with various types of language disorders.[126]
Even after beginning to use three and four word sentences, for months Genie primarily spoke in two-word utterances. In these early longer sentences, she began explicitly using pieces of grammar which the scientists thought she knew but had been unable to confirm. She started including the first-person subject, expanding sentences such as "Love Curtiss" to "Genie love Curtiss", and could incorporate what would have previously been a modifier-noun or possessive utterance into a longer sentence, changing the sentence, "More soup" to, "Want more soup".[lower-alpha 4][4][127] For the scientists, this convinced them beyond all doubt that Genie understood subject–verb–object word order. Before December 1971 Genie could only use one noun at a time in a sentence, saying, "Cat hurt" and then, "Dog hurt" as two separate sentences, but beginning in 1972 Genie could form and use increasingly complex noun phrases in ways that were clearly not imitative. In early 1972, when asked to describe a photograph, she said, "Curtiss, Genie, swimming pool".[4][5]
Between November 1971 and May 1972, Curtiss administered a test designed to gauge Genie's comprehension of simple modifier-noun sentences by instructing her to point to one of three different-sized shapes.[lower-alpha 5][128] When asked to point to the "little" one, she consistently pointed to the medium-sized one. At first Curtiss thought these were simple mistakes, but determined that Genie was instead viewing non-specific adjectives describing size, such as little, as absolute rather than relative values without superlative or comparative markers. Between January and May 1972 her comprehension of sentences with modifiers significantly increased and in the latter phases of testing, after Curtiss replaced the word little with tiny, Genie's responses showed clear comprehension; after May 1972, she gave all correct answers whenever scientists tested her on them.[5]
Scientists tested Genie on comparatives from January 1972 into 1973 and found she answered with 100% accuracy for comparatives, regardless of whether they used the word more or the suffix -er, but noted that she never used them in her own speech. Prior to 1972 Genie responded to the conjunctions and and or as if they both meant and, but even after recognizing there was a difference never fully grasped the meaning of or. On tests, Genie showed perfect comprehension of and while giving correct answers to tests with or fewer than 10% of the time. Genie seemed especially frustrated with being unable to grasp the meaning of or, and tried to pick up nonverbal hints from Curtiss while showing via expressions and body language that she did not know the correct response.[5][129] Despite her difficulty on tests, Curtiss noted that Genie always understood disjunction marked by the word or in everyday conversation. Genie never attempted to use any other conjunctions such as but or if, and with one possible highly ungrammatical exception she never attempted to connect two sentences.[8][130]
In early 1972, the scientists noted the first instances of Genie combining verbs to form two-word verbs in her sentences. During the remainder of the time scientists studied her most of these were two-word utterances requesting an action, such as "Leave on", but on at least one occasion in early November 1973 she included a two-word verb in part of a longer sentence, "Take out coal mine [the Riglers' name for a closet in their house] school bag".[lower-alpha 6][131] She also began using to use two consecutive verbs in some of her three and four word utterances.[132][131] Genie could also use two words, such as "piece wood", in different contexts, but a later analysis of these types of phrases speculated that she treated them as a single word in her vocabulary as opposed to combining the two words to form a noun phrase.[133] Genie's first locative sentences also appeared around this time, although they were only two or three words, always in either noun-noun or verb-noun form with one of the nouns being a locative noun, and contained no prepositions. At the time this started to occur, the scientists observed the first construction of verb phrases in Genie's speech.[5][134]
Throughout January and February 1972 Genie began more consistently speaking in two-word subject–verb and verb–object utterances, bolstering the belief that she had mastered English word order.[85] During this time she began gaining use of some prepositions, spontaneously using the words in and on. The scientists wrote that these were the first words in her speech that exclusively served a grammatical purpose.[5][119] Even after demonstrating her ability to use them Curtiss noted that Genie did not always include them in her utterances, and that all of her early uses occurred when she was answering a question from another person.[135]
Although Genie produced possessive sentences by the start of 1972, tests administered during January and February 1972 of that year which included sentences such as, "Point to the cat's foot" and, "Point to the foot of the cat" yielded only 50% correct answers. After March of that year she demonstrated full comprehension of both on tests, despite not using either of these constructions in her speech, and after two more months, in May 1972, she began to use the verb have in possessive sentences, i.e., "Miss Fromkin have blue car." In February 1972 the scientists also observed Genie beginning to use negative sentences, all consisting of "No more" preceding either a noun or a noun and a verb, such as "No more take wax". In all of these sentences, linguists wrote that she simply added "No more" to the beginning of what could have been an utterance by itself.[4][5][120]
In the spring of 1972 Genie began to spontaneously use the definite article the, marking the first time she used any determiners in her speech. For several months she almost exclusively used it in imitation, only rarely including it in her own sentences.[5][136] In April and May 1972,by which time she was steadily increasing the complexity of her verb phrases, Genie began these with similarly expanded noun phrases. During the month of June she began to use "No more" with only a verb, such as "No more have", to form negative sentences. As with her earlier negative sentences, she simply used "No more" at the beginning of what could have been an utterance in and of itself.[5][134] In July of that year the scientists noted Genie's first verb-verb phrase sentences, such as "Like chew meat", and she then quickly began using complex verbs with complex noun phrases, as in the utterance, "Want buy toy refrigerator".[4]
Another early test Curtiss administered was on regular plural forms, and by July 1972 Genie still did not use them in her speech and on tests gave correct answers at only a chance level. At that point Curtiss said she decided to assist Genie with learning them by devising a test specifically designed towards getting Genie to utilize plurals, marking the first time she actively attempted to teach Genie any grammar. By August 1972 Genie had clearly mastered regular plurals, and even after Curtiss made the test significantly longer in August 1973 remained perfect in responses. This contrasted with earlier observations of people acquiring language in their right hemispheres, who normally never learn any single/plural distinction.[6] No one observed her incorrectly using this phoneme, but while she used it in imitation only did so in five (all undated) spontaneous utterances even after full comprehension and practice with pronouncing it; three of these were marked with /z/ and two with /s/, although Genie changed the /z/ sound in one of the words to a /d/.[5][137] In addition, she never used any irregular plurals such as children or teeth.[124]
After another few months, in November 1972, Genie could correctly use the word on—although at that point it was not completely clear if she distinguished between on and in—and could correctly use the suffix -ing to describe events in the present progressive. These were the first grammatical markers observed in her speech, and both are normally two of the first grammatical markers young children are able to use. Curtiss wrote that all of Genie's earliest utterances containing in and on were answers to somebody asking her a question, and also noted that she never incorrectly used -ing.[5][119][135] Her use of the suffix -ing on exclusively dynamic verbs also indicated to linguists that Genie was categorizing verbs as either dynamic or stative. However, she did not use this with the verb to be until the fall of 1973, and then only when speaking in the first and third-person. Even after learning the present progressive, she inconsistently gave correct responses to these sentences on tests. Furthermore, whereas most children learn to modify a sentence by adding, subtracting, or inflecting the words within it, use of the suffix -ing proved to be the only way in which Genie could modify a sentence without changing any of the base words.[138][139]
Throughout the time the scientists tested Genie they tried to teach her to count in sequential order, which proved very difficult for her. Soon after her admission to Children's Hospital she demonstrated some understanding of the concept of numbers and number words, and had learned to be able to recognize the number of objects in a group up to the number 7 through her gestalt perception. Despite this, she did not start to count until late 1972. When she began to, her efforts were very deliberate and laborious and her progress was extremely slow. The scientists noted that she performed significantly below average on non-language sequential order tests, which are predominantly controlled in the left hemisphere of the brain, and suggested that her inability to count was a manifestation of her difficulty with these tasks.[140][141]
In December 1972, after Curtiss and Genie had accidentally been locked out of the Riglers' home, Curtiss said to Genie, "Tell them [David and Marilyn Rigler] what happened" and Genie pointed to the door and said, "Tell door lock". This indicated she had some degree of recursion in her grammar, and the scientists interpreted another utterance from 1973, "Ask David see swing", as further confirmation she had grasped recursion. As this is one of the properties of human language that separates it from all other forms of communication, Curtiss considered this especially significant.[5][107] The scientists also interpreted the latter utterance as the first complex sentence she had produced.[142]
Although Genie understood and could freely use intensifiers such as the word very, and had already showed full comprehension of comparatives, until December 1972 she only tenuously grasped superlatives. She never used them in her own speech, but when listening to others she appeared to understand them by at least this time. Curtiss noted Genie was generally better with the suffix -est than with the word most, but thought that Genie might not have known the actual meaning of -est. The contrast between her understanding and lack of production of superlatives furthered the researchers' belief that, even in the absence of language, her cognitive structure had developed in some form.[5][143]
In early 1973 Genie started using definite articles in imitative utterances, such as "In the backyard".[142] By this time she had also gained the ability to spontaneously use the prepositions next to, beside, behind, in, at, front, and after.[5][119] However, until 1975 she exclusively used at in the phrase at school, leading Curtiss to believe at school was one word in her vocabulary, and Genie less consistently understood other prepositions such as behind, over, and in front of. Curtiss wrote that on tests Genie frequently mistook both behind and in back of for in front of, though by 1977 her understanding of behind on tests had substantially improved.[5][144][94] By contrast, on non-test settings Genie's responses to in front of, behind, in back of, and under generally indicated comprehension; unlike most children, who learn under a long time before the other three, she had somewhat more difficulty with under.[145]
In March 1973 Genie seemed unable to grasp on or under when evaluated on one of Curtiss' tests, even though she had correctly used on in non-test settings. The scientists suggested this disparity was likely due at least partially to logistical difficulties with the test, as she had to simultaneously speak and move objects into different positions, which they did not require her to do on subsequent preposition tests.[5] When given a different test Genie at first gave correct responses to on 48% of the time, and her confusion was mostly with the words in or under; by September 1973 she showed full comprehension of both in and on, and Curtiss thought her earlier problems with on could have had more to do with the test's structure. During that month, Genie began to use the words in and on as determiners as well.[lower-alpha 7][146] Soon afterward she began consistently including a in noun phrases, and eventually she could use both articles and the words and and more in noun phrases.[7][147]
In the early spring of that year Curtiss noted the first instances of Genie including prepositions and determiners in adverbial phrases, such as, "In hospital, shot hurt arm", although she still frequently deleted them.[142] Around the same time she began to use the determiner another, as in the sentence, "Another house have dog".[146] Genie's acquisition of locative adverbs came before she learned ones for either time, such as tomorrow, or manner, such as otherwise, which was normal. A few months later she started to use time adverbs, but never used any manner adverbs.[148]
By April 1973 Genie began regularly using verb particles in her spontaneous utterances, frequently using phrases such as "put back" and "take off" in her speech. During that month she also began to form imperative sentences using the vocative, as in "Go way Joel, finish story!", suggesting not only progress in her language comprehension but an increasing level of self-confidence and self-concept.[lower-alpha 8][5][142][149] Researchers noted she began using imperatives much later in the language acquisition process than most, as they are usually among the earliest types of sentences young children form, and that they remained very infrequent. Although the scientists thought this might be due to her emotional problems, they also speculated that it requires the speaker to feel a right to demand something of someone and required a higher level of self-concept than Genie seemed to have.[5][142]
By mid-1973 Genie had begun to include indirect objects in her sentences, as shown in utterances such as "Curtiss give me valentine" and "Grandpa give me cookie chew".[5][142] Although Genie could use both definite and indefinite articles, even by 1977 she did not distinguish between the two. In addition, whereas most people learn to use demonstratives, such as this or those, and numbers at the same time, she never used these in her early spontaneous noun phrases. In 1977, Curtiss noted that Genie had still never used any demonstratives in her speech. In the fall of 1973 Genie began correctly using the verb has as the third person singular form of the verb to have, but continued not to conjugate it in most situations. This, combined with the fact that Genie never used any other third person singular forms, suggested to Curtiss that she may have learned it as a separate word and not as a conjugation of the verb to have.[7][150]
In October 1973, in addition to forming negative sentences with the phrase No more Genie began to use the word "No" by itself. For both, she still simply appended the negation it to the beginning of an otherwise unaltered utterance, which was the normal first step for children learning negation.[5][119][125] About a week later she started using the word not in the same manner in sentences and showed clear understanding of more complex forms of negation, although Curtiss noted that they never tested her on a complex sentence containing a negation in both clauses.[5][151][152] But while children usually quickly progress to saying "I not have toy" and then "I do not have toy", and then learn to use contractions, Genie did not move past the "Not have toy" stage for more than a year.[5][6][153] Until 1975 she could only use negations at the beginning of a sentence, such as, "Not good fish tank".[4][7] In addition, despite clearly understanding the prefix un- as a negative form by this time Genie never used it in her speech.[154][155]
Early pronoun comprehension
Starting in September 1972 Curtiss spent a great deal of time measuring Genie's acquisition of pronouns, and wrote that the pronoun tests were among the most difficult for Genie. For the first year Genie strenuously resisted them, often refusing to respond all or clearly guessing, but Curtiss was able to extract some useful data from these early tests and from her observations of Genie outside in other settings.[5][156] By December 1972 Genie understood and could spontaneously use the pronoun I, even pronouncing it with more stress for emphasis, but almost exclusively used it with either the word want or like. Even after demonstrating knowledge of I, when she referred to herself she frequently used her name. She did not show any comprehension of any other pronouns besides you and me, which she interchangeably used; Curtiss said Genie would often say, "Mama love you" while pointing to herself, attributing this to a manifestation of Genie's inability to distinguish who she was from who someone else was.[4][157][158] Genie did not use any other pronouns in her spontaneous utterances or gain any use of pronominal forms in her speech, although by 1973 she clearly showed that she understood the reciprocal pronoun each other.[5][8][156]
In 1973 and early 1974, when Genie became more receptive to the pronoun tests, on one such test Genie's responses were correct less than 50% of the time when identifying possessive pronouns such as his, your, and my by pointing to different body parts on a picture of a boy and a girl.[5] By 1973 she began to use the possessive pronoun my, as in the sentence, "Willie slap my face", making my and the possessive pronoun her the only pronouns she demonstrated any understanding of in any setting. It was clear to Curtiss that this comprehension was not total, and was at least partially predicated on the method of testing.[lower-alpha 9][159][119] On another test from this time, from a description using different pronouns Genie had to identify one of a series of pictures of children either being fed or eating. When given sentences with reflexive pronouns, such as "The boy is feeding himself" or, "He is feeding himself", she got more wrong than right, but did somewhat better on sentences using object pronouns such as "He is feeding him" and "He is feeding her."[5][61] Curtiss also recorded Genie using the word it twice, but only in sentences that were, for all practical purposes, imitative utterances.[160]
Interrogative questions
Prior to January 1972, if someone asked Genie to give a verbal response to a question using the interrogative word where she invariably responded by saying the last word of the speaker's sentence. In early January 1972 she began to give accurate, grammatical responses to these questions in conversations. By February 1972, in everyday interactions Genie clearly understood and appropriately acted on most questions using the interrogative words who, what, where, when, why, which, and how.[135][161][162] Unlike most children, who grasp who, what, which, and where questions much earlier than when, how, or why questions, the only one of these which took longer for Genie understand was why and even this took much less time than linguists expected. Researchers speculated this was because, while these questions and their answers all contain the same grammatical structures, the latter group of questions require more cognitive sophistication to properly answer. This helped to prove to the scientists that Genie's cognitive functions were at a higher level than most children in similar phases of language acquisition.[5][135]
Despite appropriate responses to these questions in non-test settings, during test sessions Curtiss found Genie almost completely unable to respond when asked simple questions such as "Who is the girl pulling?" or "What is the red box on?" Most of the time she did not react or reply to test questions at all, and when she did it was clear that she could not make any sense of the sentence. In her responses she would either state the answer in the question itself, attempt to fuse two separate questions into one, or simply attempt to transform a declarative sentence into a question. In all cases, the resulting sentences were obviously ungrammatical and completely nonsensical; two of her typical efforts were, "What red blue is in?" and, "Where is tomorrow, Mrs. L?"[9][163] Curtiss could not discern any method to Genie's verbal responses, and after seeing how much trouble it gave Genie decided to stop administering this test.[5]
Genie also remained entirely unable to ask an interrogative question or use any grammatical markers to indicate questions in conversations and would only attempt to do either, whether speaking or using word cards, if someone specifically requested that she do so.[lower-alpha 10][5][163][164] In an effort to work around this, Curtiss attempted to help Genie memorize a few interrogative questions for use in everyday situations. These attempts, which began in mid-1973, were also totally unsuccessful; for instance, in late May 1974 when Curtiss asked Genie to repeat, "Where are the graham crackers?", Genie said, "I where is graham cracker" or, "I where is graham cracker on top shelf."[165] This inability was extremely unusual for a first-language learner, as children typically learn to use questions as they begin understanding them and typically ask interrogative questions in their earliest two-word sentences. In addition, it starkly contrasted with her ability to learn other ritualized speech.[161][166] After approximately a year people stopped asking her to produce interrogative questions, after which her ungrammatical efforts to form them completely ceased.[163]
Curtiss theorized Genie's difficulty with forming interrogative questions was likely due to two main factors. Genie had no deixis of any kind—person, place, or time—in her grammar, which in and of itself would have made it impossible for her to use any interrogative questions. She also had no linguistic movement in her speech, which interrogatives require. In 1975, the scientists speculated emotional difficulties may have made her unwilling to attempt forming them in spontaneous speech.[161][165][167] Curtiss attributed Genie's inability to memorize a grammatically correct interrogative question to being generally unable to remember sentences using grammatical elements she had not mastered, which is typical of young children.[168]
1974–mid-1975: Later testing
| Utterance | Date | Notes | Curtiss' gloss (if any) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Another dog have house. | Early 1974 | Spontaneous use of a determiner | The other dog has a house. |
| Talk Mama to buy mixmaster. | May 4, 1974 | Complex complement structure | I'll tell Mama to buy me a mixmaster. |
| I am thinking about Miss J. at school in hospital. | May 6, 1974 | Two prepositional phrases in one sentence | N/A |
| Want Curtiss play piano. | August 7, 1974 | Sentence indicating desire | N/A |
| I want think about Mama riding bus. | November 20, 1974 | Increased complexity of complement structure | N/A |
| Teacher said Genie have temper tantrum outside. | May 2, 1975 | Serial verb construction | N/A |
| I do not have a toy green basket. | July 25, 1975 | Do-support | N/A |
From October 1973 to January 1974, Curtiss tested Genie on simple past tense sentences such as, "The girl opened the umbrella" and found that Genie was only correct 50% of the time. However, Genie was far better with past tense completive sentences marked with the verb finish, such as "The girl finished opening the umbrella". from February 1974 to June 1975, she only gave one incorrect response to a sentence phrased this way.[4][5] Curtiss deliberately added this element into her past tense test after Genie had begun learning sign language, as linguists already knew that children learning American Sign Language learned to comprehend and use the completive past tense aspect much more quickly than children learning spoken English. By mid-1975 it remained unclear whether she had any use of irregular past tense verbs, such as to go, as all of her utterances containing them were either imitations or responses to questions which had used them.[169]
Curtiss also used this test to gauge Genie's knowledge of future tense sentences, and found that Genie was almost perfect at identifying them if they were phrased with the going-to future construction, such as, "The girl is going to open the umbrella". However, she showed no comprehension when Curtiss asked her to identify a sentence with an identical semantic meaning but using the auxiliary verb will. This was in stark contrast to most children, who almost always correctly respond to both. The scientists wrote her lack of comprehension or use of auxiliary structures, despite understanding identical messages phrased with inflected words, was consistent with her ability to grasp conceptual information far better than grammar.[5][132]
By early 1974 the scientists estimated that Genie's grammar was congruous with that of a typical two or two and a half year old, although her acquisition continued to be far slower than normal children. In the early part of that year Curtiss began testing Genie's ability to distinguish between the active and passive voice. They found that, unlike most children but similar to adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients, she was completely unable to draw the distinction and gave random responses to sentences such as, "The boy is pulling the girl" and, "The girl is being pulled by the boy". In her speech, she never gained any use of the passive voice.[4][6][107] In these sentences Genie would often, though not always, confuse the subject and object, which was a major contrast with both her ability to process subject–verb–object sentences in other contexts and her own subject–verb–object sentences. However, these reversals were only with certain pronouns, and by January 1974 she had begun to show marked improvement.[170]
At the end of 1973 and into early 1974 Genie's locative sentences underwent considerable expansion, as she produced utterances such as, "Like good Harry at hospital".[4] In a few sentences from this time she began to incorporate the words of other people into her own utterances, as in "Dentist say drink water"; direct quotations would remain the only situation in which she could engage in any embedding of elements of language, and these remained very rare.[lower-alpha 11][171] On one occasion in early February 1974, Genie showed the ability to use the iterative aspect via reduplication in the utterance "Tomorrow big, big prize hula hoop". Curtiss noted that this kind of reduplication is much more commonly expressed through the word very, which she wrote made Genie's use of it noticeably abnormal.[172]
In the late spring of 1974 Genie began to use the phrase no more to represent its common lexical meaning, as demonstrated in the utterances "Have no more", "Not have more"—which Curtiss interpreted as two variations of the same intended sentence—and "No more penny".[173] During May 1974 Curtiss recorded the first instances of Genie using compound noun phrases, which were the only times Genie would use the one conjunction she knew, and. At the same time Curtiss noted Genie's first compound sentences, such as, "Mama not have baby. Baby grow up.", but with one possible exception, the utterance "I want save money buy two rectangle box" dated early October 1974, she did not use any compound verb phrases.[lower-alpha 12][5][7][174][142] In that same month Genie correctly used a few verb infinitives in her speech, including to buy, but Curtiss wrote that in all cases Genie clearly treated them as one word and never observed Genie appending the to to the beginning of a verb to form an infinitive. Later that month Genie showed that she understood the comparative fewer in everyday conversations, although she still did not understand the words many, most, few, or fewest.[173] During this time Genie also began adding the possessive pronoun my to her possessive sentences, and correctly used the marker 's to indicate possession.[5][174][142]
In both test settings and conversations Genie still had some difficulty with reversing I and you, my and your, and me and you, but during the summer of 1974 she began to show definite improvement in both her comprehension and production of first and second person pronouns. At the same time, she started to demonstrate the ability to modify first subject and then object pronouns. In August 1974, Curtiss recalled asking Genie, "You were driving a tractor?" and Genie responding, "I driving tractor", and in the same month, when Curtiss asked "Do you want me to tell you?", Genie said, "Tell me." By mid-1975, although she continued to confuse both me versus you and my versus your on occasion, it occurred with much less frequency.[7][175] Curtiss also noted Genie starting to use the benefactive case in the summer of 1974, although she did not always include the word for.[7][176]
Genie also understood self, as well as its plural, selves, as a reflexive pronoun marker. In most scenarios she understood reflexive pronouns, except when she encountered a noun phrase with a pronoun she misunderstood; for instance, if given the sentence, "He is feeding himself", she frequently confused he with she and therefore changed himself to herself. By contrast, she was still unable to fully understand object pronouns.[lower-alpha 13][177] In sentences with reciprocals or the reflexive pronoun themselves Genie appeared to understand the pronoun they, but never used it in her own speech. Curtiss thought Genie was likely guessing the meaning from context, as Genie could discern plurality from the elements of the sentences using it. Her pronoun acquisition was described at that time as "painfully slow", and she still did not use any pronouns besides I in her speech, but researchers insisted there was definite progress. There were certain pronouns, such as the word there as a pronoun, that Genie never used or understood.[178][179]
In the fall of 1974 Genie used a few sentences with internal negatives, using the words no, no more, and not. Although all but two of these sentences were ones she had specifically practiced, and one of the spontaneous occurrences was partially an imitation, Curtiss saw this as a significant step. These sentences grew progressively more common and by the beginning of 1975 she had completely mastered internal negatives, as shown in utterances such as "Ellen not work at school". Curtiss did not view this as true linguistic movement, and thought that Genie's grammar had simply changed in such a way that she placed negations in the middle of a sentence.[7][180]
By the fall of 1974 Genie had begun to differentiate between third-person pronouns such as he and she, but still had a high rate of error. In her speech she still would not use third person pronouns, and continued to lack either relative pronouns or indefinite pronouns.[5][181][182] In late 1974, she used locatives after an object phrase for the first time; since she had already been using locatives to modify subject noun phrases for a long time, the lateness with which she did this surprised the scientists.[7][183] At around the same time Genie had begun to use more than one prepositional phrase in some of her sentences, and during the spring of 1975 Curtiss tested Genie on the preposition between and found Genie showed full comprehension in all instances.[7][180]
In 1975 Genie began to use a different type of serial verb construction, in sentences such as "I like go ride Miss F. car". Curtiss noted that all of these were first-person utterances, that she almost never said the word I, and that she frequently used standalone verbs, such as go, which typically precede a second verb; although in several cases she used the verbs go ride and go walk, Curtiss thought Genie may have treated these as single words. Therefore, she wrote that although these utterances were progress they were not as complicated as they initially appeared. In addition, all of these sentences were in verb–(verb–verb phrase) form which Curtiss argued had no hierarchical structure.[7][183]
Through 1974 and 1975, Curtiss tested Genie on other types of complex sentences as well. She wrote that she would repeat the sentence if Genie initially did not understand it, the only test for which Curtiss did this. In non-test settings during early 1975 Genie gave some indications that she grasped conditional sentences, and at least once gave a verbal response to David Rigler which may have demonstrated clear understanding. This would have been a huge gain, as conditional sentences require a high level of cognitive sophistication, although Curtiss said she could not be completely sure of whether Genie truly comprehended them. Curtiss also noted that, despite the fact that Genie clearly understood contractions, no one ever observed her using any in her speech.[6][184]
By at least 1975 Genie clearly understood the concept of temporality, and on early tests with sentences containing the words before or after she could correctly respond to sentences such as, "Touch your nose before your ear" or, "After you touch your ear, touch your nose." When she incorporated these terms into her spontaneous speech she appropriately used them, as shown in utterances such as "After dinner use mixmaster." Unusually for people acquiring a first language, she understood the words before and after before learning markers for past or future tense. Later she could not only produce spontaneous sentences with temporal terms but could use sentences to indicate causation, albeit without saying the words if–then; for instance, Curtiss recorded one utterance, "Neal not come, happy. Neal come, sad."[8][185]
Despite mastering temporality, by 1975 Genie remained largely unable to respond to sentences where the nouns were not in the same sequence as the events, such as "Touch your ear after you touch your nose". The scientists noted that on these types of sentences she improved more with sentences asking her to do something after instead of doing something before, which they wrote did not fit with a hypothesis, proposed in 1971, that had predicted children would learn the word before first.[186] In a 1981 paper, Curtiss interpreted Genie's temporal utterances as an expansion of Genie's vocabulary. An outside analysis of Curtiss' writings, however, concluded that Genie had to have acquired some degree of grammar to have formed these sentences and questioned Curtiss' use of the term semantics to describe this function of her speech.[7][8]
When asked to distinguish between all, some, and one, at first Genie would interpret some to mean all. By 1975, she had reversed this and began mistaking some for one instead, which Curtiss interpreted as a sign of progress.[lower-alpha 14][132] This contrasted with her distinction between more and less, which she had demonstrated by at least August 1973.[5] In everyday conversations, she also demonstrated understanding of the qualifiers one and all. When learning relative terms such as large and small or narrow and wide Genie simultaneously learned both words in the pair, whereas most people acquire either the marked or the negative form first, and never mistakenly used one term in a pair to mean the other. Although she had difficulty with them on tests, she showed significantly greater comprehension of different pairs of relative and relational terms outside of test settings.[6][188]
In early 1975, Genie began to use a type of ungrammatical sentence with a subject–verb–(object or subject)–verb–({subject or object}–verb) construction; two such sentences were "I want mat is present" and "Father hit Genie cry long time ago". Curtiss wrote that some of these could have been typical, grammatically correct sentences if Genie had included relative pronouns—for instance, the first sentence would be grammatical if she had said "I want the mat that is present"—but others such as the second looked to Curtiss like two separate sentences which Genie had combined, and in the process of doing so removed some of the nouns. At around the same time Genie also began to produce ungrammatical sentences containing a copula, first with utterances such as "Is Akron" and later to including verbs without the -ing suffix such as "Boy is pinch". Approximately one half of these types of ungrammatical sentences were Genie's responses to people who told her to, "speak in sentences", which she would interpret as being asked to include a form of to be in a sentence; unlike her attempts to form interrogative questions she produced some grammatical sentences with copulas, such as "Glass is clear". As with interrogative questions, when not pressed to produce sentences containing these structures the errors she made with them immediately became far less frequent.[7][189]
Despite mastering word order, Genie still had difficulty with distinguishing between simple actor–action–object sentences. In 1975, when given the sentences "The girl pulls the boy" or "The boy pulls the girl" and asked to point to the corresponding picture, her answers would either be all correct or all incorrect. While this was progress from 1971 and 1972, when she simply guessed, this indicated that she was attempting to use a word order strategy but could not ascertain a specific formula. Her difficulty with this also manifested itself in her inability to use word order to tell the difference between sentences such as, "What is on the blue box?" and, "What is the blue box on?". In addition to the disparity with the results on pronoun and relative clause tests, which indicated Genie was using word order strategies, researchers wrote this was a major contrast with the clearly defined word order rules observed in her spontaneous speech.[5][190][140]
By early 1975 Genie showed comprehension of simple and complex sentences where the object was the relative clause, such as "The boy is looking at the girl who is frowning", or sentences where the subject was the relative clause and did not end in a noun phrase, such as "The boy who is frowning is looking at the girl".[151][152] However, when interpreting a complex sentence in which a relative clause ending in a noun phrase came before the main verb, such as "The boy who is looking at the girl is frowning", she interpreted the noun closest to the verb as the subject. The scientists wrote that this meant that she was using a word order strategy to determine the meaning of these sentences, which they considered progress because her earlier responses to them were clearly guesses.[lower-alpha 15][5][191] By this time Genie could only consistently count as high as 7 in sequential order, and her ability to do this came at the expense of her ability to do so via gestalt perception.[lower-alpha 16][5][190][140]
By 1975 Genie demonstrated full comprehension of several paired words, such as long and short or high and low. Most of the time she learned both words in a pair at the same time, and in a few cases, she learned either the negative or the marked word in the pair first; for instance, she learned the word narrow before wide and few before many. For some paired words, such as left and right, her answers on tests were still less than 100% even by 1977, but she consistently showed the same level of understanding for each word. However, Genie never made any distinction between the words here and there; on multiple tests, when told to come or go to a person or area her response to either, "Come here" and, "Go there" was to go to either the closest or the farthest person or area irrespective of who had spoken.[5][192]
When Genie left the Riglers' house in mid-1975, at the age of 18, she had acquired a degree of vocabulary and grammar far greater than that observed in non-human subjects. In June of that year, David Rigler wrote that she continued to make significant strides in every field which the scientists were testing.[7][107] Despite the marked improvement in Genie's language, it was still clearly abnormal. The words she learned continued to remain far ahead of the grammar she possessed and still showed an unusual focus on objective properties, and the gap between her receptive and expressive vocabulary had grown. While her use and comprehension of grammar had clearly improved, and papers from the time indicated she was continuing to acquire it, they were still highly deficient and her progress remained far slower than linguists had anticipated. and how much of what she did use was attributable to acquisition versus rote memory was not readily obvious.[4][118][193]
Auxiliary structure
Despite Genie's grammar acquisition, her speech had remained entirely devoid of pro-forms, modal verbs, modal particles, or auxiliary verbs such as have or will.[5][194] In the spring of 1974 Curtiss thought Genie may have acquired use of the contractible auxiliary you, but even by the time she published her dissertation she remained unsure of whether Genie actually learned this as grammar or merely used it in sentences that were mostly imitations.[7] Genie was able to memorize a few ritual phrases containing auxiliary structures, but because could only use them in very specific ways linguists did not interpret her use of these sentences as evidence of grammar acquisition. In January 1974 the scientists noticed the first instances of her using copulas in her spontaneous sentences, which they considered a significant gain, but Curtiss noted that Genie never used a contractible copula such as "That's mine".[7][195][94]
By early 1975, Genie had started including do-support in some of her sentences; for instance, in June 1975 she said, "I do not have a red pail". This was the only use of any auxiliary structure in her speech, but even then she sometimes both used and omitted it in the course of a conversation and only used it in negative sentences with phrases she had memorized; Curtiss wrote that this was almost exclusively with the phrase I do not have. This caused Curtiss to speculate that Genie had memorized the words "I do" as an independent phrase as opposed to using the word "do" as a separate auxiliary word. Even then she often incorrectly used it, as in sentences such as, "I did not sad" (also from June 1975; Curtiss' interpretation of the sentence was, "I am not sad"), and frequently omitted it altogether. Curtiss recorded two utterances in which Genie used do-support in other types of sentences, "Do not like bird at school" and "Did paint".[6][7][196] Of these, linguist Derek Bickerton noted that the latter was a response to an explicit question from Marilyn, "You wanta paint it [a picture] or are you trying to tell me you did paint it?"[emphasis as in the original][197][196]
Conversational abilities
During everyday interactions with other people Genie inconsistently applied what linguistic abilities she possessed, although her use of grammar remained better in imitation than in her own spontaneous speech.[4][5][198] Her ability and willingness to engage in verbal interactions steadily increased during her stay with the Riglers, and she used her language to serve a progressively larger number of functions. Nonetheless, she continued to speak very little, and when she did talk it was almost always in utterances significantly shorter than she was actually able to spontaneously produce. Because of this, the scientists wrote that it was extremely difficult to analyze her comprehension and use of grammar in conversations.[4][199]
Sometimes, despite clearly demonstrating comprehension of an aspect of grammar, Genie would not use it in everyday interactions. For instance, even after learning to use imperatives she very rarely included them in her speech, and although she responded if called she would almost never call someone to her and seemingly never grasped the idea of doing so. While she could use imperatives in a scenario Curtiss and the Riglers presented to her, she could not bring herself to say anything when the real situation arose.[5][200][197] They also noted that if someone said to Genie, "If you want me, call my name" she invariably responded as if the person had told her to call his or her name.
In many cases, such as utilizing past tense or plural words, even if Genie demonstrated proficiency with an aspect of grammar she would only use the correct words or markers if separately and specifically asked. Sometimes, despite giving an obviously incorrect verbal response to a sentence, the scientists could tell she clearly understood the other person. For instance, if someone asked Genie a yes or no question she often repeated part of the question to indicate affirmation or said "no" even if she meant yes and was shaking her head the correct way. Curtiss designed a test to ensure Genie actually understood the words yes and no and concluded that she did, therefore concluding that Genie was simply repeating the last word of the sentence.[5][124]
By contrast, Genie frequently understood and could respond to highly complex questions that she showed no comprehension of on tests. In addition to understanding most interrogative questions, she could also respond to a sentence which required some degree of inference or one which performed both a locutionary and illocutionary act. Curtiss especially pointed to one occasion when someone asked Genie, "Do you want me to play the piano for you for a little bit?" and Genie answered, "Long time."[8] Her comprehension of other complex sentence structures remained inconsistent in conversational settings, although beginning in November 1973 researchers recorded slow but noticeable improvement.[5][201][197]
Besides measuring Genie's grammatical abilities in conversations, the scientists also attempted to measure her conversational competence. Most of the time, a conversation with Genie consisted either of someone asking her a question several times until she responded or her saying something to which the other person responded.[202][153] Unless Genie was actively attempting to control the direction of a conversation, she relied on the other person to achieve and maintain the flow of the interaction. She was generally more willing to discuss topics which interested her, and was far more likely to respond if people were talking about these topics, although she would sometimes attempt to join in a conversation on other matters.[203][153][204] At least once, in May 1975, she actively initiated a role-playing game with Curtiss during which they both had to speak, and although Genie did not talk very much she reportedly said two short phrases.[101][101]
During an interaction, Genie typically did not acknowledge statements, requests, or other common pieces of conversation. When someone tried to tell her something she often would not show whether or not she had heard or understood them, and when she did respond there was often a significant delay. Curtiss wrote that Genie steadily decreased her response times in conversations during the course of her stay, although even by mid-1975 they were sometimes unusually long.[5][205] If she did respond it was often a repetition of something which had been said earlier, and she used these repetitive statements to serve several conversational functions.[lower-alpha 17][206][202][153] When Genie wanted to talk about something during the course of a conversation she would sometimes allow the subject to change, but often persisted by repeating herself even after someone had made multiple efforts to discuss something else.[107][203][124]
When Genie was not perseverating on a specific subject she normally went along with a topic somebody else raised, and when attempting to enter an ongoing conversation she would try to say something relevant to what the other people were discussing. On one occasion in September 1973 Curtiss and Marilyn were talking about an upcoming family vacation the Riglers were planning, which they knew Genie was nervous about, and during their conversation Genie said "Little bit trip" to express a desire that the vacation be short. Besides showing Genie was listening to the people around her and was interested in conversation, it indicated she was willing to use language in new ways. If she could not say something semantically related to the topic of a conversation, she sometimes tried to join in using other means. Curtiss recalled one dinner conversation at the Riglers' home in 1972, in which several people had been using the word "tenant"; in an effort to contribute to the discussion, Genie said the word "ten" and held up ten fingers.[5][207]
During her stay with the Riglers, Genie steadily included more grammatical complexity in her speech during everyday interactions. The scientists also noted that she began to apply her language to more everyday situations.[5][6] Despite this, throughout the entire time scientists worked with her no one observed Genie engaging in any kind of experimentation with language, either with different speech sounds or with the aspects of grammar she knew or was in the process of learning. This was extremely unusual for someone acquiring a first language, as most young children will experiment with phonology and new grammatical structures before fully understanding them.[208]
In the early summer of 1974 Genie began using language to describe fictional events, attempting on at least two occasions in the last two years of her stay with the Riglers to tell a lie. Soon after the first of these lies, in July of that year, she began to describe some of her fantasies to the scientists in language. Curtiss recorded one conversation Genie had with Marilyn in which Genie, who was discussing her desire to be with her bus driver, specifically expressed what she wanted him to do with her as if he had actually done so, but acknowledged that these events had not occurred when Marilyn pointed this out. Researchers considered both of these very substantial cognitive and linguistic gains.[209][210]
Researchers' papers from the time indicated that, both through exposure to conversation and sessions teaching her to interact with other people, Genie's conversational competence significantly increased but remained very low. In everyday interactions Genie became steadily more willing and able to speak during her stay with the Riglers, often spontaneously contributing to an ongoing discussion, and sometimes doing so even if the conversation did not initially involve her and was not specifically about her. Although she remained inconsistent at responding to other people, by mid-1975 she had shown significant improvement.[211][202] Despite this, Genie generally did not talk very much and continued to speak far less than most people in equivalent phases of language acquisition.[5][205] In her dissertation, Curtiss wrote that in many aspects Genie's overall demeanor continued to bear a strong resemblance to that of a person who had not been socialized.[212][213]
The scientists found Genie's inability to master conversational skills was unsurprising, since she had grown up without seeing these kinds of interactions. Curtiss noted that many emotionally damaged children and autistic people who can use language have similar difficulties with conversations. By contrast, there had been numerous documented cases of mentally retarded people who communicate with far less difficulty despite having much less language.[214][153] They suggested that the ability to engage in conversation was a separate skill from simply knowing language, which would make Genie's difficulty with conversation attributable to her lack of socialization during childhood instead of her language constraints.[4][214][202]
To supplement Genie's language acquisition, once Genie started to combine words in her utterances the scientists worked to teach Genie ritual speech for common everyday situations. Soon after beginning to produce two-word utterances Genie learned the phrases "Give me [example]", "Help me [example]", and "I want [example]", and somewhat later the scientists also taught her to say "May I have [example]?".[lower-alpha 18][215] Analyses of Genie's utterances beginning with "I want" concluded that Genie treated the phrase as one word, and noted that the dependent clauses could all have been separate utterances and never had markers indicating dependence. Linguists also noted that the phrase "Help me" always preceded a verb, whereas "Give me", "May I have", and "I want" always preceded nouns.[216] In addition, since she could only use the word may as a part of the phrase "May I have" to ask a question and never produced a statement or asked about someone else with it, Curtiss did not consider these utterances to be true use of an auxiliary structure.[217]
By contrast, Genie never learned to use any automatic speech and did not use interjections during conversations. Even if she was interested in speaking to someone she could not start an interaction with automatic speech, and efforts to teach her met with no success. She only responded to ritual questions, such as "How are you?", if someone repeatedly asked her and pushed her into responding; then she could say "How are you?" or "I am fine", but it would be very forced. The only time she gave any response was when the speaker had some additional affect, after which she usually laughed or tried to get the person to do it again.[lower-alpha 19][218][219] In addition, Genie never learned any profanity nor ever used other substitute swear words.[220][202] These aspects of speech are typically either bilateral or originate in the right hemisphere, and split-brain and hemispherectomy patients normally learn to use them without any difficulty, but this did not affect the scientists' assessment of Genie as an extremely right-hemisphere dominant thinker and Curtiss was not especially surprised that Genie never mastered them. She wrote that children normally learn these very early because they are exposed to conversational speech, but Genie's childhood gave her no opportunity to observe conversation.[220][141]
Recalling past events
During a visit to Children's Hospital near Christmas 1971 a boy playing with a toy pistol frightened Genie, and when Curtiss tried to reassure her and Genie responded with an abbreviated version of Curtiss' words, saying, "Little bad boy. Bad gun." About two weeks later, while Curtiss was with Genie at the Rigler's house she heard Genie saying something to herself and using a gesture she had invented for the word "naughty". When Curtiss asked Genie what she was saying, she repeated the words, "Little bad boy. Bad gun." out loud for several minutes, marking the first time she used language to refer to something in the past.[209][221] After this, she began to speak about other past events. Eventually, she was able to tell people about what someone else had said if the listener had not been present. Curtiss recalled one day in 1975 when, a long time after Genie listened to neighbors talking about their new baby, she told David Rigler about the story in detail.[222]
Several months into Genie's stay with the Riglers, David and Marilyn overheard her saying, "Father hit big stick. Father is angry." to herself, marking the first time that she had spoken about her life before starting to acquire language. Her ability to discuss her childhood gave researchers new insights into her early life.[lower-alpha 20][107][224] During the rest of her stay with the Riglers, they said she would speak to herself about her childhood and constantly repeated "Father hit" to herself. Although she never talked about her early life very often, when she did she could eventually provide longer and more detailed memories of her past. The Riglers tried to get her to talk about it as much as possible, and Marilyn would sometimes coach Genie by role-playing as Genie's real mother. She gradually began to speak about her father, and could talk about his treatment of her.[9][107][224]
Monologues
In late 1973 Genie was with several of the scientists, including Curtiss, and noticed that the people around her were keeping track of everything she said. At the time she was going through a phase during which she was extremely interested in people writing things down, and to the astonishment of everyone present she suddenly indicated she wanted people to write her speaking. Upon getting the attention of everyone in the room she proceeded to talk in a series of short utterances that added up to a monologue that was much longer than any of her previously recorded speech, showing what was for her an unprecedented willingness to try different methods of verbal expression. She did not use any words or grammar which she had not already fully mastered, but she seemed to be using different words to try to expressing her thoughts and ideas, making it the closest the scientists ever saw her come to attempting language experimentation of any kind. Curtiss thought Genie was engaging in some sort of free association, and found Genie's verbal expression of entirely nonverbal events especially intriguing. During the rest of her stay with the Riglers, linguists recorded Genie spoke at this length a few more times; Curtiss wrote that these later monologues also consisted of a series of short utterances, and mostly focused on either recalling a recent event or talking through thoughts on something earlier in her life.[208]
Lot friend... Ruth Smith... Mrs. F... Ralph... Grandma... Mama Grandma... Elizabeth... Sam... Andy... Judy... Mama... Curtiss... Laura... Billy... Marilyn... Miss N... Carol... Miss U... Wendy... Father... Sam... Ann... Andy father... Father Bob... David... Genie... Patty... David... Lynn... Tom... Miss R... Rick... Peter... Tori... Baby... Nancy... Don... Miss J... Bert... Dennis... Fido... Cat... Mrs. L... Roy bus driver... Mr. B... Carl.. Mike... Mike has blue car... Train... Bus... Airplane... Blue burner... Stove... Boat... Chair swing... Take bath... Ocean hit back... Go shopping... Walk pier beach... Home... Go park... Go school... Go trip... Go hospital... Go Grandma house... I like potty chair... Work... Go eat... Drink... Go dress... Alone... Go diving... Climb mountain... Go ride... Ride bus... Ride boat... Airplane... Push cart... Go ride wagon... Ride cart... Ride horses... Ride van... Car have mirror... Ride truck... Skate... Go walking... Ride sled... Ride wheelchair... Ride laundry box... I like a lot people... Ride jeep... Swimming pool have floating chair... Go ride floating chair... I like dancing... Ride pony... Ride helicopter... Ride elevator... Ride escalator... Ride bus up in the sky... Go camper... Eat beach... Eat in the park... Eat Hospital... Eat home... Eat at school... Eat restaurant... Eat camper... Ride merry-go-round... Ride box up in the box... Like Marilyn back home... I like walking... Stair[s]... Walk on the floor... Ride baby buggy... Ride carriage... Catch ball... Rock back and forth... Curtains... Running... Ride fast.. I like jumping... Father angry... Spit out... Car have mirror... Ruth Smith has skate board... I like Genie... Cut nail hurt father... Very angry make BM... Lady... Man... Boy... Girl... Eat go trip... Go zoo... Eat zoo.. Go picnic... Eat big boat... Go big boat... Go doctor... Go farm... Eat farm... Go outside... Go dentist... Fix teeth... I want see Mama Saturday... Genie eat Saturday.[208]
Speech progress
When Genie first moved in with the Riglers her vocalizations remained extremely high-pitched and soft, and throughout Genie's stay the scientists spent a considerable amount of time working to strengthen her voice, and made substantial efforts to improve the volume, pronunciation, and articulation of her speech.[4][6][225] Some of Genie's pronunciation rules and limitations were characteristic of typical General American English speakers, but many others were highly atypical.[226] Genie's speech typically contained unusually extensive deletions and substitutions, including vowel reduction, neutralization, and consonant modifications, and she typically spoke in an unusually high-pitched and monotonic voice. Curtiss determined that, despite the randomness with which Genie applied many of her pronunciation rules, there were several clearly defined patterns in her speech.[227][63] Although Genie's voice became stronger, and her pronunciation became clearer and more consistent, as late as 1977 Curtiss wrote that Genie's speech was extremely difficult to represent using standard IPA characters because her articulation was so abnormal.[226] The scientists believed that her abnormal pronunciation, especially her deletions and substitutions, significantly masked her comprehension on a number of their attempts to measure her proficiency in grammar and morphology.[5][61][228]
Despite Genie's unusual speech patterns, her progress with learning to pronounce individual phonemes followed relatively normal patterns.[4][5][229] Similar to young children, Genie's enunciation remained far better in imitation than in her own utterances.[5][61] Some of Genie's pronunciation rules and phonological limitations were normal for General American speakers; for instance, Curtiss wrote that Genie never pronounced a voiceless glottal fricative at the end of a word or syllable coda and only pronounced a final palatal approximant or labio-velar approximant as an off glide. When Genie substituted sounds she usually, although not always, replaced a sound with one that sounded fairly similar. She also never replaced a vowel with a consonant nor replaced a consonant with a vowel, indicating that she did limit the variability of her substitutions.[226]
From the outset scientists could tell that Genie's vowel substitutions were clearly not random, but wrote that she did not seem to draw distinctions based on normal classification such as front versus back or open versus close vowels. She would frequently reduce diphthongs to monophthongs and lax the vowels, but this rule was optional and seemingly applied at random; when pronouncing the word "two", for example, she said it either as [tʊ] or [tu][5][230] Early on she invented a grammar rule allowing for devoicing of vowels and, although optional, even after she could better control her voice she would frequently devoice syllables, especially if the first consonant in a word or syllable was voiceless. Although she usually only applied this to a monosyllabic word or the first vowel of a multisyllabic word, sometimes she devoiced entire multisyllabic words or whole phrases; for instance, on at least one occasion she pronounced the word Christmas as [kr̥i̥ʲm̥i̥ʲ]. This made her speech, which was already very soft and breathy, sound even more so.[lower-alpha 21][231]
As with vowels she would often either delete consonants, and typically simplified or deleted consonant clusters. There were three sounds, the voiced dental fricative and the two standard affricate consonants—voiced and voiceless palato-alveolar affricates—which she did not spontaneously pronounce until 1973. If she did not outright delete them, she replaced them with different phonemes. After 1973 she only inconsistently pronounced these sounds, although Curtiss wrote that they underwent similar amounts of substitution and deletion as did other sounds in her speech.[4][232] Until 1973, instead of pronouncing alveolar lateral approximants and retroflex approximants as separate sounds she articulated both in a manner that Curtiss described as a sound somewhere in between. After learning to pronounce them as distinct sounds, for the combinations /ɛr/ and /ar/ Genie invented an optional rule which permitted her to change their pronunciation to /ɛʊ/ and /aʊ/ respectively.[233]
The one regular exception to her consonant pronunciation rules was the rhotic approximant /r/ (/ɹ/) in a consonant cluster, which almost always remained intact regardless of whether it was the final consonant or occurred directly after a vowel and directly before another consonant. Curtiss wrote this was because Genie seemed to interpret the sound /r/ as a part of the preceding vowel instead of a separate consonant.[234] At first, the only other consonant clusters she would pronounce were ones beginning with an /s/ followed by a liquid consonant. Curtiss wrote that there were patterns to both her deletions and substitutions of consonants, and that the variability of her consonant pronunciation was considerably lower than that of vowels.[235][63]
For initial consonant clusters consisting of an initial consonant preceding a liquid consonant, Genie would simplify it. Curtiss cited Genie's articulation of the word "blouse", which she had pronounced /bæʷ/. For the first six months Genie had this rule it was mandatory, but after this time it became optional. In words with an initial obstruent followed by a liquid consonant she would frequently devoice the /l/, although this rule was optional; for instance, she pronounced the word claw as both [l̥ɔː] and [klɔː].[233]
In normal speech Genie would frequently, but not always, delete the final consonant. The scientists speculated that, according to her grammar, the final consonant was optional. Researchers suspected this was why Genie did not usually use plural forms, possessive markers, and past tense or third person singular conjugations, despite her apparent comprehension of them.[5][61] During her first two years of language acquisition she almost never pronounced final consonants, but started to do so more often in 1973. For a retroflex vowel at the end of a word, Genie had a separate optional rule allowing her to remove an /r/ which did not apply to the combination /ɛr/. With a final nasal consonant, Genie would inconsistently pronounce it; if she did not she either nasalized the preceding vowel or changed the consonant to a non-nasal, but never both.[5]
The scientists determined that Genie's final consonant deletion rule did not follow any discernible pattern, and was always optional in her speech. Even during 1971 and 1972, there were some occasions when she pronounced final consonants; for instance, one day in mid-January 1972 she said "soup" both with and without the final /p/. Furthermore, if someone imitated her deletion of a final consonant she would laugh, reply, "Silly", gesture, and then say the word with both the final consonant and any sounds she had initially deleted. Curtiss speculated that Genie simply was not paying attention to how her speech sounded.[236] As she spoke more often she began more frequently pronouncing final consonants, but she never used a voiceless labiodental fricative, a voiced bilabial stop, or a voiceless dental fricative to end a word. Curtiss was unsure of whether this was simply due to her frequent substitutions of these consonants or if this was a function of Genie's speech.[232]
In addition to her deletions Genie would also frequently substitute consonants, although with considerably less variation than with vowels. In words with an initial or medial /m/ Genie often substituted the sounds /p/ or /b/, and for an medial or final /n/ she would substitute the sounds /t/ or /d/; both of these rules were always optional.[lower-alpha 22][237] Until 1973, for an /ʃ/ sound Genie had an optional rule allowing her to either delete it or substitute the sound /sʲ/. The one exception was that prior to 1973, with only one deviation, in a word-final position she would simply delete the /ʃ/. Starting in 1973 she would still usually delete it at the end of a word, but when she did pronounce a final /ʃ/ she always articulated it as a /ʃ/ or a /t/.[237] When Genie used voiceless stops to start a word, they were aspirated or unaspirated seemingly at random; for instance, she pronounced the word "ten" both as [tʰɛn] and [tæ̃].[4][5]
For the sound /t͡ʃ/ Genie often substituted either an /t/ or /tʲ/, and for the sound /d͡ʒ/ she often substituted either /d/ or /dʲ/; for instance, she pronounced the word "chin" as [tɪ] and pronounced the word Jeep as [diʲːp].[5][238] Both of these substitution rules were also optional, and she seemed to arbitrarily apply them. In a consonant cluster starting with the sound /s/, until 1973 she would always delete the /s/.[239] For several months after starting to pronounce [t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ] she did not use either of these sounds as initial consonants, and inconsistently used them as final consonants. Similarly, when she began using longer words and sentences she often deleted unstressed syllables; for instance, she usually pronounced the word "refrigerator" as [frɪ].[5][238] For the first few years after starting to speak she would regularly substitute the /t/ sound with a /k/, /n/, or /s/.[4][5]
In November 1971, Genie displayed an ability to change pitch and volume while singing that she had never demonstrated in her speech. Around a week after the first time she sang, while on a trip to the hospital, Curtiss improvised a song to calm Genie down and Genie again surprised her by singing along. Curtiss especially noticed that Genie sang the word "hospital" far louder than she had ever spoken. Almost a year after moving in with the Riglers, while David Rigler was examining and cleaning her ear, to the great surprise of the scientists Genie uttered the only recorded scream of her lifetime. The scientists did not know why she had screamed on that particular occasion, or why they never heard her do so again.[240][241]
Curtiss and Fromkin wrote that by 1973 Genie seemed to be slowly improving her articulation and that she had clearly strengthened and gained more control over her voice, although her pronunciation was still abnormal. During that year, Genie started to use pitch variation for stress as well. Vowel duration remained the primary method for doing so but became much less obtrusive and exaggerated, although she still did not vary her pitch or volume to indicate either questions or imperative sentences.[119][242] While her voice remained largely monotonic, she began to utilize more speech patterns and intonation; she demonstrated some ability to do it in spontaneous speech, but it remained better in imitation.[4][5][229] By at least mid-1973, when Curtiss administered tests designed to determine what sounds she could pronounce, she had the ability to distinguish and articulate all the sounds of General American.[5][61] Despite this she still did not use either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives in spontaneous speech, even though she had been imitating them since June 1972, and inconsistently used affricates in her spontaneous speech.[4][5][243]
In 1973 Genie began to articulate consonant clusters consisting of an /s/ sound followed by a nasal consonant, although this remained optional. For words starting with an /s/ followed by other types of consonant clusters Genie started to break up the cluster with an epenthetic schwa and soon after, in longer words where she would have previously deleted a vowel, she began to include a schwa where the deleted sound would have been; Curtiss thought Genie invented a grammar rule allowing her to either delete or reduce these vowels. Because reduced vowels in English are generally schwas, and she did not use any other random vowel sound to serve this purpose, her use of a schwa in these situations was of particular interest to the scientists. Linguists wrote that they thought it may have been evidence that she was gaining command of English phonology.[4][5][244] In mid-1973 she began infrequently aspirating syllable and word final stops, and the following year, when she started to pronounce more final consonants, she would on rare occasions devoice a syllable stop or final consonant; for instance, she sometimes pronounced the word "rug" as [rukʰ]. Curtiss was unsure why Genie did this at all, and the frequent substitutions of consonants made it impossible for her to discern the reason for its rarity.[245]
By 1974, the scientists wrote that although her speech remained behind her comprehension, her progress with both language and speech was occurring at the same rate. They further noted that Genie's pronunciation of both liquid consonants, /l/ and /r/, was now normal. In addition, her substitutions of /t/ sounds were now only occurring in medial consonants.[4][61][246] Sometime during 1974 she created a rule, which was always optional, in which she would replace the sound /ɡ/ (/g/) with a /d/ and a /k/ with a /t/; for instance, the word green could be pronounced either [driː] or [griːn]. Although her application of this rule seemed arbitrary, the consonants used to replace the /ɡ/ and /k/ were not random; this led Curtiss to believe this was a true function of Genie's speech.[247]
By 1975 Genie had started to pronounce both /ð/ and /θ/, albeit rarely, in various word positions. When she did pronounce them she invented an optional rule allowing her to stop them by substituting them with a /d/ and /t/ respectively, as evidenced by her pronouncing the word the as both [dʌ] and [ðʌ].[247] In early 1975 the scientists tested her on 20 different English grammatical structures in 1975, her score was below the average level of a first-year second language English student. However, they later wrote that this was likely at least partially due to her frequent consonant cluster reduction/simplification and final consonant deletion, which were still very frequent in her speech at that time, as it was an oral test and took points off for excluding grammatical markers. Linguists therefore believed her actual knowledge of these structures was potentially significantly higher than the test results indicated.[6]
In 1975 the scientists said that Genie's voice had clearly strengthened and she showed more obvious stress patterns in all of her spontaneous speech, modifying both pitch and volume for emphasis, but she continued to avoid speaking if possible because producing them remained extremely laborious for her. Her vocalizations were still soft and breathy, and they wrote that, "it is still very difficult to understand her if you have not been with her for a period of time."[61][63][225] She still had considerable difficulty with controlling the pitch of her voice, and when she attempted to her entire body frequently stiffened from effort and concentration.[4][6][225] In mid-1975 she could speak with a relatively normal declarative sentence stress pattern, and began to do so with increasing frequency, but remained unable to use intonation to indicate a question.[4][61][248] Even then her pronunciation also remained abnormal, as she still frequently deleted and substituted sounds in her speech. In her dissertation, Curtiss wrote that Genie typically laxed and centralized the pronunciation of both vowels and off-glides.[248]
Haplologies
During Genie's stay with the Riglers, when she started forming longer sentences her speech would typically contain extreme and intentional haplologies. She frequently omitted morphological elements which, though necessary to make sentences grammatical, would have been clear to present observers. Curtiss cited the utterance "Mike paint" since in isolation it could either have meant Mike's paint or Mike paints, but its meaning was evident because Genie said as it as Mike—the pseudonym for one of the Riglers' children—painted a cabinet.[249][250] Although this is normal for young children at the outset of language acquisition, as they learn more grammar they typically decrease the number of omissions in their speech; by contrast, Genie continued to delete most grammatical markers even after completely mastering them. This caused speculation among the linguists that Genie had an early grammar rule mandating the omission of grammatical elements which were non-essential in context, but later made this an optional rule.[251]
At other times Genie condensed and deleted sounds, syllables, or entire words in such a way that she rendered her speech ambiguous. For no discernible reason, sometimes she said the same sentence with and without any omissions; on one day in September 1973, Curtiss recorded Genie saying the same sentence as both "Take shopping" and "Take me shopping".[252][253] In addition to making it difficult for others to understand her this made it hard to be completely certain about Genie's linguistic abilities, and they speculated this may have led to her scores being significantly lower on certain language analysis tests.[5][61][228] In May 1972, by which time Genie was regularly speaking in three or four-word utterances, she attempted to truncate several of her sentences to monosyllables, pronouncing the sentence "Marilyn come back" as [mæ̃k] and "Monday Curtiss come" as [mʌ̃k]. Marilyn and Curtiss then told Genie they could not talk to her if she spoke in such a manner, after which she stopped attempting such extreme haplologies, but she continued to condense sounds when possible.[254][253]
Nonverbal communication
Even while speaking, Genie continued to use supplementary nonverbal gestures to improve her intelligibility. Prior to mid-1974 she invented gestures to indicate specific phonemes and homonyms, which she used regardless of semantic context; for instance, when she created a gesture for the sound /tɛn/ she used it when she said either the word "ten" or "tenant". Sometimes Genie would use one gesture for two similar-sounding but not completely identical words, such as her use of the same gesture for both the words "disappear" and "disappointed". Prior to receiving sign language instruction, she never applied any of these gestures to more than one word based on anything besides phonetic value. This was markedly different from previous observations of people inventing their own gesture systems, which had documented people exclusively creating and using gestures to indicate semantic meaning.[255]
With some words Genie would pantomime them as she spoke; for instance, the scientists noted she would crouch into a seated position when she said the words "sit" or "sick". Although this is normal to some degree among children, it is generally ancillary to their speech and becomes less prominent as they acquire more language. By contrast, Genie continued to use these movements as an integral part of her vocabulary. Genie would also act out events, and to encourage Genie to talk Curtiss devised a game in which she and Genie created short sentences which they then simultaneously spoke and acted out.[40][5] During her stay with the Riglers she began to draw pictures if she could not express herself in words, and she sometimes used existing pictures from magazines or books to relate to daily experiences.[107][40][256] Curtiss and Fromkin unsuccessfully tried to teach Genie to read and write, and in 1973 Curtiss stopped her efforts, although other people made subsequent attempts; by the time Curtiss presented her dissertation Genie had learned to read approximately five to ten names and words, and could write individual letters in print.[4][257]
While living with the Riglers Genie gradually began to outwardly exhibit more of her emotions, both positive and negative. Curtiss wrote that a major breakthrough she observed occurred when, upon going to the Riglers' house one morning in 1972, she found Genie in tears because she was feeling sick and Marilyn had just told Genie that she needed to see a doctor.[258][259] Throughout the time Genie lived with the Riglers, they and the other scientists saw how frequently and effectively Genie used her nonverbal skills. For reasons the scientists never managed to discern she still seemed to be able to communicate her desires to complete strangers without speaking, and everybody who worked with her remembered several times during her stay when someone gave her something or did something for her despite her not saying a word. In several interviews years later, David Rigler recounted an occasion when he and Genie passed a father and a young boy carrying a toy firetruck when, even though they had not spoken to each other, the boy suddenly turned around and gave the firetruck to Genie.[9][260]
In 1974 the Riglers arranged for her to receive sign language instruction; Curtiss described the type of sign language Genie learned as being, "a system of signing somewhere between American Sign Language and signed English in its grammatical system."[261][262] Curtiss wrote that as soon as Genie started learning sign language, she would often simultaneously speak and sign. Even when learning sign language Genie continued to use and invent her own gestures, but while she continued to use her existing gestures for individual phonemes she started creating new ones to convey a semantic meaning.[9][263] The scientists did not specifically test Genie's sign language, and Curtiss did not sit in on Genie's sign language sessions, but noted a few aspects of her progress. Curtiss recorded that by February 1975 Genie could use the sign to indicate a plural, and that by the spring of 1975 could correctly use the sign indicating past tense. In addition, in response to a request to start a sentence in sign language with the word he Genie produced "The boy signing is he cookie".[264]
Post-1975
In June 1975, despite Genie's progress the National Institute of Mental Health cut off their support for the case study on Genie.[9][265][266] Shortly afterwards, in the early summer of 1975, Genie moved out of the Riglers' home to live with her mother. Despite the grant ending Curtiss continued to meet with her, both to continue administering weekly tests and to spend time with her outside of the test sessions, and the Riglers maintained contact with Genie and her mother.[267][268] While living with her mother, Genie continued to be largely unresponsive to statements or requests. After a few months, Genie's mother had her transferred to the first of a succession of foster homes.[9][269][270]
| Utterance | Date | Curtiss' gloss (if any) |
|---|---|---|
| I want live back Marilyn house. | November 1975 | I want to go back to Marilyn's house to live. |
| Genie Mama have a father long time ago. | December 1975 | N/A |
| Spool wind thread. | December 1976 | N/A |
| Think about Mama love Genie. | August 1977 | I am thinking about my wish that that fact [sic] that Mama loves Genie. |
| Do not through. I want through. | October 1977 | That box is opaque. I want the kind you can see through. |
| Hot dog eat, eat the hot dog, eat hot dog. | November 1977 | N/A |
Soon after moving into this foster home the people running it began subjecting Genie to extreme physical and psychological abuse, causing her to rapidly regress and return to her coping mechanism of silence.[9][271] The incident with the largest impact occurred when they severely beat her for vomiting and told her that if she did it again she would never see her mother, rapidly accelerating her regression and making her extremely scared of opening her mouth for anything, including speaking, out of fear of vomiting and facing more punishment. As she still wanted to communicate with people she knew, she began almost exclusively using the sign language she learned while living with the Riglers.[9][270][271] During this time Curtiss was the only person who had worked with Genie to have any regular contact with her, meeting once a week to continue testing, and she wrote that Genie's speech severely deteriorated due to the abuse she endured. Curtiss later recalled Genie frenetically signing to her, but said she could not bring herself to open her mouth so she could speak. At one point while living in this home, she refused to talk for five months.[153][269]
Upon Genie's removal from this location in April 1977, due to her condition she required a two-week stay at Children's Hospital. While there she was able to see her mother and the Riglers, and her condition somewhat improved, but she continued mostly using sign language for communication.[9][269] At that time, Curtiss and Fromkin obtained year-long grants from the National Science Foundation to continue their work.[7][272] After her stay at Children's Hospital authorities moved to another foster home for several months, an arrangement in which Genie reportedly did fairly well but which unexpectedly ended in late 1977. After giving her temporary accommodations through the end of December of that year, authorities then moved her into a different location. In early January 1978 Curtiss wrote that every one of these moves was very hard on Genie, causing continued regression in all aspects of her life, and that their frequency heightened their traumatic impact.[7][270]
In 1976 Curtiss finished and presented her dissertation, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", which analyzed the progression of Genie's language from the time of her admission to Children's Hospital until the early summer of 1975. It received reviews from several prominent scientists, and the following year Academic Press published it.[107][3] Curtiss continued her testing and observations throughout 1977, and recorded the last of Genie's published utterances in November of that year.[7][153][204] After Curtiss met with her on January 3, 1978, Genie's mother suddenly prevented her and all of the other linguists from seeing Genie, entirely ending all of their testing and evaluations. In early 1978 several of the scientists stated an intent to continue working with and testing Genie, but were never able to carry out their planned exams.[6][11][273] On March 30, 1978, the court officially turned guardianship of Genie over to her mother, and despite several requests during the following years she forbade all of the scientists except for Jay Shurley from seeing Genie as well.[7]
Post-1977
After completing and publishing her dissertation, Curtiss became a linguistics professor at UCLA. In early 1978 she conducted her first analysis of Genie's language after her dissertation, although she did not release any new linguistic data at that time, and published Genie's utterances from after mid-1975 and analysis of them in papers she wrote and co-wrote in 1979.[6][153][204] Of these utterances, 4 came from the period between mid-1975 and April 1977—including only one from 1976—and 34 came from the period between April and December 1977.[lower-alpha 23][7][153][204] After this, despite the lack of new data Curtiss continued to analyze Genie's language in later papers.[274][154][275]
Between early 1978 and mid-1993 Genie moved through several more institutions and foster homes, some of which subjected her to extreme levels of abuse and harassment.[9][276] Shurley saw Genie at least twice after 1977, at her 27th birthday party in 1984 and again two years later. He later recalled that on both occasions she seemed very depressed and barely talked, made almost no outward expressions of any kind, and made very little eye contact. In 1992 Curtiss said that she had only heard two updates on Genie's condition since 1977, and that both had indicated she almost never spoke. When author Russ Rymer published his book on Genie in 1993, he wrote that as of 1992 she very rarely spoke. In a 1994 afterword to his book, Rymer wrote that in early 1993 Genie's mother had told him Genie was more verbal, albeit hard to understand.[277] The Riglers reestablished contact with Genie and her mother in mid-1993, and David Rigler wrote that when he and Marilyn saw Genie for the first time in 15 years she immediately recognized and greeted both of them by name.[13]
The latest available information on Genie's speech came in May 2008. That year ABC News reported that, in 2000, someone speaking to them under condition of anonymity had hired a private investigator who located Genie. According to the investigator, she only spoke a few words but could still communicate fairly well in sign language.[2] In 2002 Curtiss said that if she were able to see Genie again she would be interested in measuring her linguistic abilities and comparing them to her earlier results but, as of May 2008, despite repeatedly attempting to find her she had not seen Genie since January 1978.[2][11]
Impact
Genie's is one of the best-known cases of language acquisition in a child with delayed development.[7][9][124] Curtiss argued that Genie's case supported Chomsky's hypothesis of innate language, but that Genie demonstrated the necessity of early language stimulation in the left hemisphere of the brain to start.[lower-alpha 24][4][278][8] Because Genie had learned vocabulary and clearly mastered some degree of grammar Curtiss contended that she definitively disproved more extreme conceptualizations of the critical period hypothesis, which predicted that no language acquisition of any kind could occur after the critical period. Instead, she argued that Genie provided evidence for a gradual variation of it; that although some degree of acquisition can occur beyond puberty, permitting some form of ability to communicate using language, it would never progress into normal-sounding speech.[8][279]
Furthermore, Curtiss argued that only language, and not any other cognitive stimulation, could initiate the lateralization of language. She pointed out that even though Genie had experienced enough environmental stimulation as a child to commence lateralization of other brain functions, her language center had not developed in her left hemisphere.[280][281] Without the required stimulation, a person would be rendered incapable of processing language from the left hemisphere of the brain and would be forced to only use the right hemisphere.[282][280] The contrast between Genie's vocabulary and grammar acquisition also further bolstered the existing hypothesis that these two processes underwent separate development during language acquisition.[107][283] Genie's inability to master language despite the clear progress in her cognitive development in other areas also suggested that language acquisition was separate from cognition, a new concept at the time.[8][284]
Genie's inability to engage in normal interactions with other people also provided more evidence that understanding the principles of language was a separate skill from the ability to engage in conversations.[285][202][141] In addition, her rapid progress with nonverbal communication and her exceptional proficiency at it demonstrated that even nonverbal communication was fundamentally separate from language.[286][8][124] Her arguments have become widely accepted in the field of linguistics and other linguists, including Steven Pinker and James Hurford, have cited Genie's case study as evidence for Chomsky's hypothesis of innate language and for of a steadily progressing version of the critical period.[283][287][282] Curtiss' findings were also the impetus for several additional studies in the field.[288][289]
Analysis of the aspects of grammar that Genie did and did not acquire aided linguists in determining which structures were more dependent on exposure to language. Prior to Genie's discovery the auxiliary component of language had been known to be one of the few children acquire at different rates depending on the amount of speech they heard, and Genie's inability to master it supported the idea that its development and that of other similar systems of grammar is more sensitive than vocabulary or more basic grammar, such as word order or recursion, requiring a more conducive language environment to properly develop and having a more specific critical period.[107][283][282] Linguists also noted the grammatical skills Genie acquired and used bore striking resemblance to the grammar of pidgin languages and the gesture systems deaf children invent when isolated from other deaf people. While both of these forms of communication contain certain aspects of language, such as vocabulary, recursion, and word order, other components such as auxiliary structures are never present.[287][290][281]
Because Genie acquired language in her right hemisphere, Genie's language acquisition refined existing hypotheses and gave rise to additional propositions about what parts of language the right hemisphere was capable of acquiring after the critical period.[6][107] Despite a few marked differences with previous studies of adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients, her linguistic development had remained largely congruous with theirs.[6][283][280] By contrast, people with the same conditions who had begun acquiring language in their right hemispheres prior to the end of the critical period had developed normal vocabulary and grammar. This further convinced the scientists that Genie's language acquisition was abnormal because she had started after the critical period, and therefore was processing language in the right hemisphere of her brain.[6][91]
Genie's case has also been used in theorizing about whether the critical period hypothesis can be applied to the acquisition of a second language, a topic which remains the subject of considerable debate.[291][292][293]
Earlier cases
Several people who have analyzed Genie's linguistic development have compared it to historical accounts of children with delayed language acquisition, including language deprivation experiments which Psamtik I, King James IV of Scotland, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II purportedly carried or attempted to carry out.[4][5] In particular, linguists have especially noted the similarities between Genie's case study and the testing of Victor of Aveyron. Both during and after the case study the scientists acknowledged the impact these cases had on their research and testing methods.[9][294][295] Author Justin Leiber wrote that Victor likely presented a more difficult case from which to extrapolate information because, unlike Victor, Genie had demonstrated significant cognitive abilities and mental development in several areas despite her lack of language.[296] Linguists and historians have also cited Genie's case as the impetus for reanalysis of these earlier cases, both comparing their language acquisition to Genie's and reassessing their value to the field of language acquisition.[297][298]
Scientists also measured Genie's language acquisition against more modern studies. Leiber compared Genie to Helen Keller and noted that, while Keller had learned language through extensive instruction, the scientists who worked with Genie primarily measured her language acquisition through passive exposure. He wrote that in doing so they had given her far less structure, and he speculated that this could have made it more difficult for her to succeed.[296] Both the research team and outside analyses especially wrote about the differences between Genie and a case in the 1950s of a girl known by the name Isabella. During her early childhood the only human contact Isabella had was with her deaf mother, and she had been isolated from all speech until the age of 6. After authorities discovered her they gave her access to therapy, and psychologists monitored her progress; within a year after teachers began working with Isabella she successfully acquired language, with reports stating that she was using both vocabulary and grammar typical for someone her age.[4][299]
Debate
Assessment of Genie
From the start of the case study on Genie until the end of 1977, the scientists' writings and presentations on Genie's language acquisition expressed varying degrees of optimism about Genie's progress. All of the papers leading up to Curtiss' dissertation discussed specific improvements in Genie's grammar and vocabulary.[4][5][300] In her dissertation Curtiss argued that, while Genie's speech was still considerably different from that of most people, her, "language performance often does not reflect her underlying linguistic ability".[301] She further wrote that Genie was still learning more language at the time of writing and considered it possible that she could complete acquisition, expressing hope that, "she [Genie] will have the last word."[7][302] An independent 2006 review of Genie's case concluded that Curtiss' dissertation displayed an unwarranted level of positivity about Genie's progress and prognosis; it pointed out that even by the time of its completion, Genie had clearly regressed from her treatment in foster care.[265]
Curtiss' later writings all acknowledged that Genie's vocabulary had steadily broadened, similar to her earlier analyses, and argued that she clearly acquired a few principles of grammar and had demonstrated the ability to incorporate them into her speech.[lower-alpha 25][303][274] However, they all had more negative evaluations of Genie's speech and argued that she had never learned any meaningful amount of grammar after all; in one, she referred to Genie's speech as "grammatically uninflected and telegraphic".[6][8][204] In a 1992 interview with Russ Rymer Curtiss said Genie's progress had very quickly plateaued and it took her several years to realize it, and although she did not give Rymer a specific date he wrote that, based on her comments and some documents she shared with him, she seemed to view the summer of 1972 as the point at which Genie's linguistic abilities stopped advancing.[lower-alpha 26][304] In a 1994 interview with Nova, Curtiss said that Genie could communicate semantic messages using language but did not speak in real sentences, citing the utterances "Spot chew glove" and "Applesauce buy store" as examples.[7][9]
Outside analysis from Peter Jones, a linguistics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, argued that Curtiss' earlier accounts of Genie's speech, up to and including her dissertation, were more accurate than those from after 1977. He wrote that, in these later papers, Curtiss used only small samples of Genie's speech to prove her points when a more representative look appeared to contradict Curtiss' arguments.[lower-alpha 27][7][153] Jones also argued that Curtiss did not provide sufficient evidence for many of her later conclusions, saying that she neither examined the utterances she cited in significant detail nor presented them in a manner conducive to doing so.[lower-alpha 28][7] In a few instances, Jones asserted that Curtiss' data outright contradicted her conclusions.[lower-alpha 29][7]
Jones also noted that despite Genie's regression after mid-1975, in 1977 Curtiss wrote that Genie was continuing to acquire grammar. He speculated that the reason Curtiss had changed her view of Genie's language was because of this regression, and noted that she only discussed it and its cause—which he said had been essential context for understanding her language development—in an interview with Rymer during the early 1990s, and never mentioned them in any of her papers. He wrote that Curtiss did not release enough information about Genie's speech from after mid-1975 to determine exactly what, if any, grammatical skills she had lost, and that the complete lack of data from any time after January 1978 rendered it impossible to determine the extent to which her language had regressed.[7][3][306] Despite the different tone of Curtiss' later works, Jones wrote that he found nothing either suggesting reevaluation of her earlier arguments or disavowal of any of her earlier conclusions. Finally, he wrote that she supplied no evidence to back up her statement to Rymer, and pointed out that the two utterances referenced in the Nova documentary were from early December 1971 and April 1972 respectively, which he argued were not representative of Genie's most advanced speech.[7][9][307]
Although Jones said it was not possible to draw definite conclusions because of the relatively few utterances Genie produced, in a 1995 paper he concluded the discrepancies he noted in Curtiss' later analyses of Genie demonstrated that, "the post-(1977) account [of Genie's speech] is not so much based on reanalysis or reinterpretation of the data but on a highly selective and misleading misrepresentation of the earlier findings."[emphasis as in the original][7] This, in turn, left an unresolved tension between Curtiss' pre- and post-1977 analyses which he said meant that until Curtiss published a clarification of her analyses, "a definitive judgment on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given."[7] In 2014 Jones maintained these arguments, and noted that no additional outside analysis of Genie's utterances and Curtiss' papers had occurred since his paper.[308] Others discussing Genie's case have since cited Jones' arguments, and similarly questioned Curtiss' later accounts of Genie's grammar acquisition. To this point, neither Curtiss nor anyone else directly associated with Genie's case has responded to Jones' paper.[309][310][311]
Scientific value
Some of the scientists who worked with Genie, including Jay Shurley, concluded based on non-linguistic evidence that she had been mentally retarded from birth and that this rendered it impossible to be completely certain about the utility of studying her language acquisition. During his sleep studies Shurley had uncovered, among a few other persistent abnormalities in her sleep, a highly elevated number of sleep spindles, which are characteristic of people born with severe retardation.[9][30][312] However, the linguists who studied Genie firmly believed that she possessed at least average intelligence at birth, and that the abuse and isolation she suffered during her childhood had left her functionally retarded. Curtiss specifically noted that some of Genie's linguistic capabilities, such as her clear ability to distinguish gender in her speech, were very uncharacteristic of someone born mentally retarded.[4][34][313] Other linguists analyzing Genie's case, including Steven Pinker, have concurred with Curtiss' position.[314]
In their publications, the scientists anticipated the question of whether emotional factors affected Genie's ability to learn and produce language. Curtiss acknowledged that Genie's childhood had obviously left a substantial impact on her, and that the outset her emotional profile may have at least partially explained her very tacit demeanor.[4][315] Linguists also thought it may have contributed to delaying her use of a few specific pieces of grammar.[46][142] However, Curtiss and Fromkin repeatedly maintained that her childhood could not have impeded her ability to acquire language. They pointed out that despite her slow progress with language, she had clearly progressed in other aspects of her psychological development and generally appeared happy with her life. Curtiss and Fromkin also noted that Genie had no difficulty expanding her vocabulary, and thought it was extremely implausible that emotional difficulties could have selectively impaired only the grammatical component of her language acquisition.[265][315][250]
Several linguists, including Pinker and Derek Bickerton, accepted Curtiss and Fromkin's assessment of Genie's emotional profile, Pinker discussed Genie's case in his 1994 book The Language Instinct, citing her case as evidence for Chomsky's innate language hypothesis.[250][281] A few, including Stephen Laurence and Susan Goldin-Meadow, used her language to support Chomsky's position but expressed reservations about the utility of her case. Laurence wrote that, due to the severity of her abuse, he considered it possible that it had played at least some role in her language development.[316][282] Eric Lenneberg knew about Genie's case and stated that he did not have any desire to study her, saying no definite conclusions could be drawn because the level of trauma associated with Genie's childhood would be impossible to discern.[315]
Other linguists, including Geoffrey Sampson, argued it was extremely implausible that the impact of the abuse Genie suffered as a child had not adversely affected her ability to learn language. In 1997 Sampson published Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate, which specifically disputed The Language Instinct and more broadly attacked the innate language hypothesis, and maintained that this negated much of the value Pinker ascribed to her case because it depended on Genie's emotional profile having no effect on her language.[317] In 2005, when Sampson published The 'Language Instinct' Debate: Revised Edition, he acknowledged criticism from other linguists that Educating Eve did not mention Curtiss' post-1977 accounts of Genie's speech and briefly discussed Peter Jones' outside analysis of them. However, he wrote this had no significant impact on his conclusions regarding Genie and therefore thought it was unnecessary to reconsider his position on how her case related to his broader arguments. To this point, neither Pinker nor Curtiss have responded to Sampson.[318]
Research methods
During the initial grant meetings in May 1971 several of the scientists felt that the prevailing approach to the case study predicated love for Genie on her progress with language, and after the meetings concluded a few entirely withdrew on these grounds.[319] Shurley minimized his involvement in the case, citing the same concerns, but remained in contact with Jean Butler, several of the researchers, and Genie's mother.[320] Almost immediately after Genie's removal from Butler's home, Butler—who married shortly afterwards and began using her married name, Ruch—accused the scientists of conducting ineffective tests and causing active harm to Genie, and for the rest of the study she constantly criticized their work and questioned its utility. After its conclusion she continued to attack the scientists, and Curtiss in particular, until 1986, when complications from a stroke left her aphasic.[321] Lawyers who worked with Genie's mother in 1977 argued that the research team subjected Genie to excessive testing, claiming they had tested her between 60 and 70 hours a week, and had pushed her far beyond the limits of her endurance. They also alleged that the scientists administered many of their exams so often that they only indicated Genie's familiarity with them, negating any scientific value they might have had.[9] By the time the case study ended, Shurley concluded it had been highly unethical and had exploited both Genie and her mother.[320][322]
All of the scientists at the center of the case study were adamant that they never coerced Genie, and said their detractors grossly exaggerated the amount of time they tested her. Curtiss emphatically stated she never conducted testing sessions for more than 45 minutes, and noted that sometimes Genie herself would initiate the tests.[4][13][323] Curtiss and David Rigler independently said that while the tests challenged Genie she mostly found them enjoyable, and maintained Genie could take a break whenever she wanted. They also pointed out that the tests were always conducted in private, one-on-one settings, and that both Genie and her testers also viewed the test sessions as bonding experiences.[9][13][323] Although Ruch never stated any motivation for her actions towards the scientists, members of the research team believed it was chiefly due to her perception that Children's Hospital staff had influenced the decision to remove Genie from her home.[13][324] The impact that the scientists' testing had on Genie's ability to acquire language has since become a significant debate within the larger scientific community.[286][296][325]
In a review of Susan Curtiss' dissertation from 1978, Susan Goldin-Meadow praised Curtiss' work and wrote that the information she provided would be of significant utility to linguists. However, she thought Curtiss' presentation of Genie's utterances hampered efforts at outside analysis. Goldin-Meadow wrote that, because Genie spoke so much less than normal, Curtiss should have included a separate appendix containing each spontaneous utterance Genie produced. She also submitted that some of the analogies Curtiss used in her dissertation to explain Genie's right-hemisphere language acquisition, especially Curtiss' comparison of Genie to chimpanzees who had acquired language, were misguided because of the enormous difference between their language and Genie's.[107]
Russ Rymer's book on Genie, published in 1993, argued that the scientists did not have an objective view of their work. In his view, the fact that several of the scientists were involved in dual relationships with Genie and her mother exacerbated their inability to dispassionately analyze both their work and their results. He further wrote that their inability to recognize this had further complicated their research, and led to the defunding of the case study. However, Rymer also emphasized that the number of people who cited Genie's case demonstrated that Curtiss' data on Genie's language was useful and had proven highly valuable to the field of linguistics, and discussed the influence it had on several subsequent case studies.[326] His works received harsh criticism from Curtiss and James Kent, but independent reviews praised Rymer's explanations of Genie's language. Subsequent authors and linguists discussing Genie's case have since cited Rymer's book.[2][7][327]
Related studies
Laura
Jeni Yamada, a graduate student who assisted Curtiss with compiling data about Genie and with advocating for her welfare after she moved out of the Riglers' home, began a study with Curtiss of a girl who had linguistic deficits that were the opposite of Genie's. This subject, first referred to in publications by the pseudonym Marta and later by her real first name, Laura, was the last of four daughters of very well-educated parents. She had been born without any apparent complications and had no history of abuse nor any serious injuries, but within a year after her birth her parents noticed she was significantly behind in her physical and mental development. Throughout her childhood her parents and especially her mother, who was a teacher, kept detailed records of her medical and psychological development. Laura had significant physical and mental developmental delays, receiving several different diagnoses and treatments to address them. At the age of 16 doctors described her as "borderline psychotic" and diagnosed her with both schizophrenia and mental retardation of unknown etiology, attributing her abnormal behavior primarily to retardation and considering schizophrenia a secondary diagnosis.[328][329][330]
Scientists' work with Laura began in October 1979, when she was 16 years old, and continued through July 1982. After this time, researchers visited Laura on a few more occasions over the course of the next eight years.[329][330] Outside of her language Laura's cognitive functions were universally highly deficient, with evaluations on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children placing her testable IQ between 41 and 48.[lower-alpha 30][330][333] Yamada wrote that her performance on language exams was markedly better than any other tests of her cognitive functions, although an outside analysis concluded that on 26 grammar tests her score was far lower than even a typical 4 year old.[334] Laura was right handed, and on a series of slightly modified dichotic listening tests with language sounds her scores were remarkably low for both ears but indicated a left-hemisphere language preference.[lower-alpha 31][335]
When Laura was a baby, her parents wrote that she was extremely quiet and frequently showed very little responsiveness to language. She only started to speak or show comprehension of a significant number of words at the age of two, all a few miscellaneous nouns such as hand and bath. For the next two and a half years her vocabulary and grammar remained unusually limited and only very slowly expanded, although her receptive language was somewhat more developed than her expressive language and she gradually began to show more interest in language. At four years and five months old Laura's parents wrote that she was beginning to speak more often and had begun using full sentences, and the following month a specialist familiar with her reported that she was using vocabulary and grammar that, while still somewhat unusual, was much closer to being typical of someone her age. After this time, her grammar began a more normal development.[336][337]
As Laura got older, her linguistic abilities became more incongruous with her other cognitive abilities.[lower-alpha 32][338] By at least the time she was nine years old she was able to form complex sentences, and in her teens she made appropriate use of auxiliary structures, could ask questions such as, "Did you hear about me not going to this school?" and could form complicated passive sentences such as, "I got it [my hair] cut already by a maid". The latter two are among the last to appear in a person's language, require a high degree of grammatical sophistication, and are relatively infrequent even in adult speech. She also utilized other complicated speech functions such as nominalization, as demonstrated in the sentence "We went car-looking".[339][330] At times Laura would accurately use sentence structures, such as time adverbials, she did not fully understand; on one occasion she said, "I got discharged [from the hospital] a month ago Saturday", which although grammatically correct was obviously inaccurate as her actual discharge date was actually several months prior.[lower-alpha 33][340] Yamada found that Laura used most grammatical structures with extremely high accuracy, although a review of Yamada's work argued that she did not release her sample size and pointed out the extreme difficulty of precisely quantifying such errors in spontaneous speech.[334]
When given a short sentence Laura had no difficulty saying a person's words back verbatim, regardless of grammatical complexity. She had more difficulty with sentences of more than nine syllables, but because she could speak in much longer sentences Yamada attributed this to Laura's low echoic memory. Except in a very few specific instances, she either refused to repeat a grammatically incorrect sentence or corrected the grammar.[lower-alpha 34][330][341][342] Yamada also believed that Laura focused more on the grammar than the semantic meaning of a sentence, frequently leading her to give excessively literal answers.[343] Laura occasionally made grammatical errors in her spontaneous speech, often in a manner consistent with children's early speech; for instance, Yamada recorded her sometimes using over-structured phrases, such as "been litten" or "gaven", or incorrect hyper-marked words such as "catched".[334][330][344] Some of her other errors were highly abnormal, in sentences such as, "She was so mad at", convincing linguists that she spontaneously generated her speech.[330][340]
Despite Laura's clear grammatical abilities, from the time she first began speaking in sentences her words frequently conveyed no meaningful information. Laura would often use seemingly random words to form a nonsensical but grammatically correct sentence, such as "She was thinking that it was no regular school, it's just plain old no buses"; on several occasions, Yamada compared Laura's speech to the game Mad Libs.[345][346][347] When she was 4 and 5 years old she developed a few stock phrases, such as "I heard"/"I've heard", which she constantly used in her sentences regardless of context. Sometimes a random word fascinated her, and she would use it as much as possible; on one occasion, when she became enamored with the word after, she had said, "My uncle who used aftershave died after a heart attack after tennis" even though her uncle was alive and never played tennis.[348][349] For no obvious reason some of Laura's utterances were very long and completely incoherent, which her parents termed "spiels", resembling those of patients with receptive aphasia. The sentences she used further convinced scientists that she spontaneously produced the grammar she was using, as the semantic content of her speech was unlikely to have been an imitation of another person.[350][351][347]
Laura understood a few very basic concepts of numbers, and could distinguish between groups of two versus three objects. She could form a grammatically correct sentence using numbers, but these sentences were obviously inaccurate and showed she did not truly grasp the concept of numbers, such as, "I was 16 last year and now I'm 19 this year" (at the time she had recently turned 16). Despite repeated efforts to teach her she usually could not accurately count as few as three to four objects, often counting the same object more than once or using the same number to count more than one object. She was completely unable to give an accurate number or simple set of numbers, such as a telephone number. Eventually she learned to list individual numbers into the teens from rote memory, but clearly gained no additional understanding of counting. This helped linguists determine that learning language was separate from learning the most basic concepts of numbers and arithmetic, as Laura was the first person with such intact grammar who could not count.[347][332][352]
From the time Laura started speaking in sentences she was usually extremely talkative, although there were some times when she would only speak in grunts or monosyllables, and frequently interrupted everyone around her. Her parents and teachers who worked with her noticed that even though she could engage in conversation, she would often speak out loud to no apparent listener. She usually spoke in a very loud voice and peregrinated on what appeared to be irrelevant topics, and even on occasions when she could stay on topic she often raised subjects during a conversation that had connections to the previous topic which she did not explain and only became apparent from talking to the people around her. Her speaking frequently vacillated between extremes, and her mood could very suddenly change during a conversation. Certain words, such as "fat" and "Beatles", could spark her desire to talk, but in many instances there was no discernible trigger. Her phonology was relatively normal when pronouncing single words, but in full sentences she was often difficult to understand because she frequently slurred words and had highly abnormal cadence and intonation. [353][354]
Laura could talk about her feelings, but showed very few outward signs of emotional attachment. Although she seemed to know what emotions she was supposed to show, she was often out of sync with everyone around her. When speaking, she frequently showed no signs of the emotions her words conveyed. What expressiveness she did have was usually extremely exaggerated, and when asked she could not explain her mood or behavior. Linguists unsuccessfully attempted to teach Laura to read, although a teacher wrote that when she was five and a half she could sight read approximately fifteen words.[355][356] Taken together, these studies helped to confirm ideas first suggested after studying Genie alone: that language and cognition are controlled by different processes, and that there is a fundamental difference between understanding and producing language.[330][288][334]
Chelsea
In the early 1980s Curtiss studied an adult in her mid-30s, known by the pseudonym Chelsea, who had not acquired a language. Chelsea was the second of seven children and was born with a severe hearing impairment; although no one definitively determined its cause researchers believed was likely related to a prenatal infection, which they suspected could have been congenital cytomegalovirus.[357][358][359] Although she was not entirely deaf she could only hear extremely loud sounds, which prevented her from learning language through listening. Her parents raised her in a caring environment and she had no history of physical or emotional trauma, and none of her immediate relatives were deaf or had any mental disabilities.[357][358][360]
By the time Chelsea was a month old her mother realized she was almost completely deaf, but doctors erroneously attributed her inability to learn to speak to mental retardation, keeping her from attending schools for deaf children.[358][359][360] Because her parents could not afford to hire a private tutor, and because she came from a very rural, isolated town without any other deaf people, she had no opportunity to study sign language. Her family later said that they did not invent a home sign, which linguists noted was highly unusual and were able to confirm through recording her family by themselves, and instead used pointing and acting out events to get across messages to Chelsea.[289][361] It was not until 1980, by which time Chelsea was 32 years old, that she saw a doctor who recognized her hearing impairment, and she then received bilateral hearing aids which elevated her hearing to a normal range.[289][361][362] In 1980 Chelsea began over a decade of intensive instruction in both General American English language and Signing Exact English, and linguists regularly measured her progress.[289]
Chelsea had average intelligence, with her IQ regularly measuring between 77 and 89, and her cognitive profile consistently fell within the 9 to 10 year old range. The neurological exam which she underwent for social services did not find any major discrepancies, although they found a few which were consistent with a mild but chronic condition, and both an MRI and EEG found her brain was entirely intact and uncovered no signs of brain damage or other abnormalities.[357][360] When researchers initially examined her brain on ERP and tachistoscopic tests in 1983, they found her extremely right hemisphere dominant for language even though, like Genie, she was right handed. When tested again around one year later, her brain did not display any asymmetry. Outside of her language, she did not have the degree of scatter that Genie did in her mental abilities.[363][364] Both Curtiss and others analyzing Chelsea's language, including Stephen Laurence, believed she provided a clearer case than Genie because of the certainty with which the scientists determined her intelligence and because she did not have any known emotional difficulties, although others, including linguist Jean Aitchison, considered it possible that Chelsea's congenital hearing impairment had influenced the course of her language acquisition.[316][365] In 2015, Curtiss wrote that the compilation of Chelsea's efforts at speech exceeded 2000.[360]
During their earliest sessions, in the summer of 1980, linguists estimated she only knew 50 words at a maximum. At that time she mostly spoke one or two words at a time, along with using some gestures, and her communication mostly consisted of labeling precise things or events she knew. She rapidly began to learn and use new words, and throughout the time linguists worked with Chelsea she excelled at acquiring vocabulary. As early as the mid-1980s, she had a vocabulary of approximately 300 words. When Chelsea did not have a particular item in her lexicon she learned to use other words to express the concept, including the ability to form compound words; for instance, when linguists administered the Boston Naming Test in 1992, upon seeing a picture of a stethoscope she said "doctor tie".[lower-alpha 35][361][366][360]
Chelsea performed significantly below expectations on tests involving matching a word to one of a set of pictures, or at generating the correct word for an object based on a picture, and Curtiss concluded that these tests significantly masked the breadth of Chelsea's vocabulary. By contrast, she performed very well on word association tests with few or no grammatical components, tests measuring her ability to generate words, and tests involving use of words in everyday situations. On the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals in 1986, when asked to list as many items as she could in a given category, her performance was congruous with a 7th grader. Curtiss noted at that time that, although Chelsea had clearly defined and mostly accurate semantic categories for words, she did not seem to generate smaller groups of closely related words within those categories; this was very unusual, as children typically begin to do this at the age of 5. When she took this test again in 1989 she scored in the 9th to 10th grade range and demonstrated a substantially larger vocabulary, but only showed relatively small improvement with listing smaller groups of related words within a category, and in 1992 she showed further improvements in her vocabulary without any significant changes to her other results.[289][361][367]
Chelsea learned to use prepositions and determiners more successfully than Genie, including a wide array of them in her spontaneous speech without difficulty, although she sometimes inserted them into sentences where they were unnecessary.[289][316] In 1986 researchers believed Chelsea could read and write around 300 words conveying a variety of meanings, and 6 years later they thought she had expanded this to more than 500 words. She also learned to count without difficulty, understood both written and spoken number words, and understood the concept of numbers into the thousands. By at least the mid-1990s she could perform basic calculations, grasped the ability to use money, and accurately used number words in a variety of scenarios.[362][360]
By contrast, Chelsea never mastered even basic grammatical properties such as word order and recursion, and she frequently misused the very few pieces of grammar she did use. She only appeared to use and understand individual definitions of words, and responded to words in other peoples' speech as if they had been spoken in isolation.[360][357][366] Whereas Genie had developed various classifications, such as general versus specific nouns and distinguishing between verb types, Chelsea never did this with any speech function. Linguists especially pointed to Chelsea's frequent attachment of suffixes to the wrong type of word, such as using the present progressive -ing with a noun or including the plural marker s on both the noun and the verb in a sentence. Chelsea's speech also remained entirely devoid of grammatically correct phrasal categories, as demonstrated in sentences such as "Orange Tom car in" (Curtiss' interpretation was "Tom is in the orange car").[360]
Of what little grammar Chelsea could use the most commonly occurring element was indication of plurals, and Curtiss wrote that she treated them as non-essential even when they would have been grammatically necessary or sometimes attached them to the wrong word. Verbs in her sentences agreed with the noun or noun phrase on some occasions, such as the utterance "They the they are swimming and the lake". In others she made clear errors, such as "Chelsea and Catherine to walks eggs and apple".[emphasis as in the original][366][360] During the first several years of testing Chelsea frequently used ungrammatical repetitions in her utterances, in sentences such as "Open eye Open" (Curtiss' interpretation was "Open your eyes"), and although these significantly decreased in her later speech she never entirely eliminated them. At times she would also omit other components of a sentence, such as a verb or verb phrase, that were necessary to make it grammatical.[360]
Even after Chelsea had received several years of language instruction, linguists described her utterances as resembling those of patients with very severe expressive aphasia. Curtiss wrote that many of Chelsea's utterances were completely incomprehensible, and even those for which the listener could determine her meaning typically had multiple grammatical errors. During the time linguists tested Chelsea she showed almost no improvement on any aspect of grammar.[283][366][360] Two examples of her speech which Curtiss cited as demonstrative were, "They are is car in the Tim" and, "I Wanda be drive come". Her communication in sign language was similarly ungrammatical, in concurrence with earlier observations of people attempting to learn sign language as their first language after the age of seven.[219][283][362]
In 1989 Curtiss wrote that Chelsea's conversational competence was very low and that she was largely unable to continue a conversation on a particular subject, but believed this was due to Chelsea's difficulties with comprehending language outside of the definitions of single words. Even if she understood what the person said, her inability to produce grammatical sentences both masked her comprehension and further hindered her ability to respond and carry on a discussion.[368][366] By the mid-1990s Chelsea's conversational abilities had markedly improved, with researchers working with her at that time writing that she was adept at starting a conversation and could either continue on or appropriately change the subject of a discussion. She also learned and made appropriate use of automatic speech, and could use interjections and other common elements of conversation such as "okay" and "well". Even then Chelsea reportedly had some difficulty providing useful information, and would frequently repeat earlier statements in the conversation, but Curtiss attributed this to difficulty with completely understanding the other person and constraints on her propositional representation.[289][369][370]
Due to Chelsea's congenital hearing impairment linguists only paid minimal attention to her pronunciation, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s did test her ability to distinguish homophones, rhymes, and minimal pairs. The first time they administered the homophone test she had some difficulty, but not as much as they expected. She also performed very well on the minimal pairs test, which linguists had not anticipated, and her errors covered every aspect of pronunciation but contained only a small number due to either vowels or voicing. During the time they tested her, she improved on all of these tasks; Curtiss specifically noted that, when linguists asked her to identify homophones four years after they first tested this ability, they were surprised to find she was perfect. Curtiss wrote that, although Chelsea's speech was, "often difficult to understand", her performance on these tests demonstrated that she understood and could utilize her knowledge of General American English phonology.[360]
Researchers who worked with Chelsea wrote that she had a very friendly personality, and unlike Genie had adequate social skills to function in most everyday situations. The only noticeable exception was that when she did not understand what someone had said to her she would usually simply repeat what she had heard, but researchers thought this was due to her limited vocabulary.[289][363][362] When using sign language she sometimes interrupted others, but scientists did not note her doing this when speaking. Her nonverbal communication and use of body language was typical, as was her rate of speech and tone of voice, and in 1998 her prosody was described as "almost normal" for a General American English speaker. By the 1990s she held down a job as a part-time veterinary assistant.[289][360][362]
Chelsea's case lent further credence to Curtiss' conclusions about age and language acquisition, and to the critical period hypothesis. Linguists wrote that Chelsea further demonstrated that the ability to acquire language after the critical period steadily declined with time.[371][283] This, in turn, led to the hypothesis of a sensitive period for language acquisition. During this period it was not possible to acquire more sensitive structures of language, such as auxiliary components, but more basic grammar such as word order and recursion could still be learned.[283][289][282]
See also
Notes
- ↑ For instance, in a tape from November 23rd Genie followed Kent's instructions when he handed her a rattle and told her, "Don't let the bunny get that rattle!" before trying to take it with a puppet of a rabbit. Kent told linguists that he was unsure of whether he had played that game with her before, leading them to believe Genie might have acted solely based on her understanding the negative command and the words bunny and rattle.
- ↑ Butler also wrote that the man she was dating, who had moved in with her during Genie's stay and was himself a well known psychologist and retired professor from the University of Southern California, had commented on Genie's talkativeness, calling her "my little yakker".
- ↑ Before mid-1975 she did not read but could remember the definition of a word card for the rest of the day, although Curtiss had to review the cards with Genie every session because this memory did not carry over to future tests.
- ↑ Curtiss wrote that Genie referred to her by her last name.
- ↑ Curtiss noted that she had included the color of the shapes in the test sentences, but because they were all the same color Genie based her response on a single adjective.
- ↑ Although she had used other two-word verbs before, such as "Get it", Curtiss distinguished these from the two-word verbs Genie used in early 1972 because Genie was clearly putting the two words together instead of treating them as one word.
- ↑ In late 1973 she temporarily used the word in for both in and on, but Curtiss believed she simply merged the sounds and did not actually confuse the words.
- ↑ Curtiss wrote that, prior to using imperative sentences, to tell someone what to do Genie would grab a person's face and orient it towards her own. The person then had to determine what Genie wanted based on gestures or other context.
- ↑ When not looking at the pictures she would often misinterpret the word her as either my or your; conversely, when looking at the pictures, she would only mistake it for the word his.
- ↑ To make requests, the scientists wrote that she would usually either point to something, use facial expressions, or repeat what appeared to be a declarative sentence until someone recognized it was intended as a question.[6]
- ↑ There was some question among the scientists over whether one utterance, "Marilyn said not lift my leg in the dentist chair", was truly an instance of embedding. Because Genie sometimes confused my and your, Curtiss wrote that it was unclear if she was trying to explain in her own words what Marilyn had said to her or if she had only reversed the pronouns while attempting to quote Marilyn.
- ↑ Even in this utterance Curtiss wrote that, because Genie had not included the word and, it was unclear whether the sentence truly contained a compound verb phrase or if it was a for–to complement sentence.
- ↑ Curtiss noted that despite this, in sentences with noun phrases that entirely consisted of nouns such as, "She is feeding him" Genie would not reverse the pronouns; the one time she made a mistake, she quickly recognized it and gave the correct answer. This meant that, for the pronoun tests, she was using some form of a word order strategy.
- ↑ Curtiss noted two complicating factors on this test. One was that one of the pictures she used may have been confusing for Genie, which may have somewhat lowered her scores. The other was that Genie had a 50% chance of getting a correct answer just from guessing, which was a significantly higher percentage than most of Curtiss' other tests.[187]
- ↑ Scientists wrote this supported a hypothesis, first proposed in 1970, that children steadily improve comprehension of these sentences for approximately four years before temporarily perceiving the first noun as the subject and the second as the object in all cases. Although it predicted this would be more pronounced in children with a right-ear language preference the scientists thought that, since Genie's brain had not undergone normal lateralization, her right hemisphere may have taken up the function causing this.
- ↑ Linguists recorded one instance of Genie verbally counting "thirty-eight, thirty-nine, thirty-ten", which Curtiss wrote demonstrated Genie's willingness to use language in inventive ways.
- ↑ For instance, when Genie first moved in with the Riglers, if she wanted to discuss something she would say "[example] hurt", as shown in utterances such as "Doctor hurt" and even though Curtiss could tell that Genie also knew the lexical meaning of the word hurt she used this word regardless of whether it was related to the subject she was raising. In 1972, she began using the phrase "I like [example]" in an identical manner to serve this purpose, and as with the word "hurt" it was clear to the scientists that Genie also understood the lexical meaning of the phrase "I like", which she demonstrated in many other utterances.
- ↑ Curtiss also noted that just using this phrase in and of itself did not guarantee that Genie would receive what she asked for.
- ↑ Once she began using the word like, if she wanted to greet someone she would usually say "like [X]" or, after learning to use the pronoun I, "I like [X]".
- ↑ One author also wrote that this disproved the theory of 18th century philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac that humans require language to form memories.[223]
- ↑ Curtiss also documented several other substitution rules for single vowels, but these occurred with much less frequency and consistency.
- ↑ Although Curtiss could not be sure, she thought Genie's creation of two distinct substitution rules for these phonemes could have demonstrated a difference between her nasalization of an /m/ versus an /n/ sound.
- ↑ An outside analysis of Genie's language and Curtiss' assessments of it noted that Curtiss did not clarify whether these were a selection of utterances or if they represent all of her observed speech from these time frames.
- ↑ Curtiss noted that the critical period was not, as Lenneberg suggested in 1967, connected with the initial lateralization of brain functions. In 1967 this process was believed to finalize at or close to puberty, but research from Stephen Krashen and Richard Harshman in the early 1970s found that it occurs around the age of five. Prior to Genie's case there were documented instances of children beginning successful first language acquisition at the age of 6 or 7, and a study of children up to 11 years old recovering from brain damage yielded no evidence suggestive of a critical period.
- ↑ 1977 Curtiss wrote that Genie obviously mastered word order, used most verbs within their constraints (for instance, she had said sentences such as, "Genie throw ball" but never sentences such as, "Genie throw"), showed some signs of feature specification, and could correctly use what bound morphemes she knew.
- ↑ He cited early drafts of a conference paper from the first 6 months of 1972 which showed extreme optimism in anticipation of Genie acquiring grammar, and noted that by the time of the presentation, in July of tha tyear, they had removed all of these statements.
- ↑ For instance, whereas in 1981 Curtiss had pointed to 13 of Genie's utterances to demonstrate a lack of grammar acquisition, Jones argued these were mostly undated and that Curtiss did not make any attempt to show these were typical of Genie's speech.
- ↑ Curtiss' post-1977 accounts took the position that, even though she could use increasingly complex sentences and expanded the structures she could use, her lack of specific grammatical markers in her utterances demonstrated that these were only the result of her vocabulary expanding.[8][305] Jones argued that her use of these types of sentences at all demonstrated that she had and was continuing to learn new aspects of grammar, and noted that Curtiss' earlier accounts had not attached the same significance to the lack of explicit markers. He further pointed out that in her dissertation Curtiss wrote many of Genie's less grammatical utterances were responses to intercession in her speech, and that after these efforts stopped Genie's ungrammatical sentences ceased, but that in a 1981 paper she used many of these utterances to demonstrate Genie's lack of overall grammar acquisition.[7][193][8]
- ↑ In 1978 Curtiss wrote that Genie began using negative sentences with internal negation and with do-support, but submitted that this was not a meaningful improvement because there were so few instances in which she used them. Jones argued that, contrary to Curtiss' paper, her using these at all proved that Genie was learning negation and therefore continuing to acquire language.[7] He pointed out that despite Curtiss' dissertation recording Genie using copulas in several utterances, in 1981 Curtiss wrote that Genie had never acquired any auxiliary structure at all.[7][8]
- ↑ Laura's verbal IQ was 20 points higher than her performance IQ, and Yamada wrote that Laura's inability to count significantly lowered her verbal IQ score and masked the extent of the unevenness. On several other attempts to measure her intelligence, her scores were even more disparate; at 11 years and 9 months old, she measured a 58 verbal IQ and a 0 performance IQ.[331][332]
- ↑ There were a few tests that the scientists could not conduct because of Laura's difficulty with focusing, and her inability to lie still due to her hyperkinetic disorder prevented researchers from conducting an MRI on her brain.
- ↑ Yamada noted that despite being unable to organize a set of pictures on the basis of gender, Laura clearly understood how to use gender in her speech.
- ↑ Yamada did note other cases, for instance the sentence "One's got married, a week", where her use of them was obviously ungrammatical.
- ↑ The one consistent exception was a sentence containing a time adverbial which did not agree with the verb tense, such as, "I will see you a month ago", which was similar to observations of children at the same age as Laura's mental age.
- ↑ Because Chelsea did not form compound words very often, and these examples did not conclusively demonstrate any linguistic comprehension besides simply putting two words together, Curtiss interpreted all of these as purely lexical knowledge.
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- ↑ Sampson 1997, pp. 37–38.
- ↑ Sampson 2005, pp. 41–42.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 59, 188, 200–204.
- 1 2 Rymer 1993, pp. 59, 188, 200–204, 211, 213.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 96–101, 106–107, 139–144.
- ↑ Newton 2002, pp. 223–226.
- 1 2 Rymer 1993, pp. 187–188.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 138–140.
- ↑ Benzaquén 2006, pp. 244–264.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 119–121, 131–144, 150–157, 202–206.
- ↑ Newton 2002, pp. 208–247.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 256–258.
- 1 2 Yamada 1990, pp. 3, 6–11, 56–57, 71.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Aitchison 1989, pp. 131–132.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, p. 257.
- 1 2 Grinstead et al. 1998, pp. 12–14.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. xv, 3–11.
- 1 2 3 4 Shatz, Marilyn (December 1994). "Review Article: Laura: A Case for the Modularity of Language by Jeni E. Yamada; First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development by Michael Tomasello". Language 70 (4): 789–796. doi:10.2307/416327. ISSN 0097-8507. OCLC 425824268. Retrieved June 20, 2014.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 15, 80–88, 101–102.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 257–258.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. xv, 7–9.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 89–90, 127.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 263–267, 272.
- 1 2 Yamada 1990, pp. 46–47, 69–70.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, p. 269.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 34–35, 47, 69–70.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 60–61, 69–70.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, p. 272.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 267–279.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 6–9, 56–57.
- 1 2 3 Aitchison 1989, p. 132.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 202–203.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 56–57.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 271–272.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 56–59.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 45–46, 49, 81, 88, 112.
- ↑ Yamada 1994, pp. 257–259.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 9–15, 56–61, 68–70.
- ↑ Yamada 1990, pp. 7, 14–16.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 201–203.
- 1 2 3 4 Curtiss 1989, p. 119.
- 1 2 3 Curtiss 1988b, pp. 99–100.
- 1 2 Pinker 2007, pp. 297–298.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Curtiss, Susan (2015). Schütze, Carson T.; Stockall, Linnaea, eds. "The case of Chelsea: The effects of late age at exposure to language on language performance and evidence for the modularity of language and mind" (PDF). UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 18 (1): 115–146.
- 1 2 3 4 Curtiss 1988b, pp. 100–101.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Grinstead et al. 1998, pp. 15–16.
- 1 2 Curtiss 1988b, p. 101.
- ↑ Curtiss 1994, pp. 229–231.
- ↑ Rymer 1993, pp. 204–206.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Curtiss 1994, p. 229.
- ↑ Curtiss 1994, p. 29.
- ↑ Curtiss 1989, p. 120.
- ↑ Curtiss 1989, pp. 117–120.
- ↑ Curtiss 1994, pp. 228–229.
- ↑ Aitchison 1989, p. 88.
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