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... s: David and Marilyn Rigler. Butler was angry because of this, and she began a relentless campaign to avenge the wrong she felt she had suffered. The Rigler's had told the Social services that if they were not able whatsoever to get anyone else to function as foster parents, they would take her in for a limited period of time, being three months.
She stayed with them for four years. During her stay at the Rigler's, Susan Curtiss kept up her almost daily visits and she recorded as much of Genies speech as she could. At the beginning of September, she began to take some of the Linguistic tests she and Fromkin had designed. Then she also found out how restless and stubborn Genie could be. She never started anything herself, and was efficient in that she only answered in the most minimal way possible. Curtiss decided she was lazy.
This made the test taking hard, as well as finding out whether she really could not speak in full sentences or just did not feel like it. Later, when she started to speak in sentences of more than one word, she also started to compress all these words in one word, using only syllables of the original words. Monday Curtiss come would turn into something like Munkuh. Only when she was firmly requested to do so she would pronounce the un condensed version. Furthermore, it was very much unclear whether she could answer questions. The fact that she did not do so could have been either out of laziness, or out of incapability.
Curtiss started to read stories to Genie, to which she at first, did not respond. On October 13 th, she finally began to respond to them: she was now listening, not just simply hearing. Genies facial expressions began to reflect the content of the stories. She also learned how to eavesdrop, because she could now listen.
She sometimes interrupted conversations between adults, at other times she would just make appropriate comments. In November, Curtiss started to teach her some nursery songs. To Curtiss surprise, the child loved them, danced and clapped along. She also sang along, and she changed pitch in a semblance of tonal control she had never shown before. A while after she had been transferred to the Rigler's and had come to rest, she was enrolled in a nursery school, and later in a school for the mentally retarded. At home she got speech therapy and was taught some sign language.
She remained quiet though. She was not very expressive, except for when she had a tantrum and became self-destructive. Marilyn Rigler taught her how to have a fit. And in these fits as well, Genie seemed to prefer gesture over word. Eventually though, Genie learned how to stamp her feet and slam doors. By November of 1971, one year after she had been admitted to the Childrens Hospital, Genies grammar was like that of a normal 18 to 20 month old child.
In the weeks before the convention in November, Genie had finally shown to recognize the difference between singulars and plurals. She also showed to know the difference between negative and positive sentences. Likewise, she showed to know the meaning of some propositions like in, so that when asked where elephants were found she could reply in zoo. She could understand yes or no questions, and could understand possessiveness. She was now producing two-word sentences, instead of one-word sentences, and sometimes she even spoke in a three-word sentence. However, Fromkin explained, a two-word sentence is quite complicated.
A lot more complicated that it may seem, since the child can not just choose any two words from that sentence, but it has to choose the two key-words. Fromkin even started to believe that Genie started to learn some of the rules of English grammar. Nonetheless she deleted the notes she took on Genies existing or not existing- grammar use before she went to the conference. Fromkin at first suspected that Genie could still learn grammar and syntax, which would disprove Lenneberg's theory. Lennebergs, meanwhile, knew of Genies case.
He was not interested in it though, because he felt the case was too muddy for good science. After all, if Genie could not learn language, her failure could be caused either by her emotional problems, or by the fact that she was already 13 -years old, and thus had passed the critical period. Then again, if Genie did acquire language, how much stronger would the rebuttal be! At that time, learning language was what she seemed to be doing. When looking back, the 1972 conference seems the point at which optimism was at its peak. In retrospect the prospects of Genies eventual triumph were already clouding over that summer of 1972.
Theories about language acquisition state that when children are in the two-word stadium, they are bound for an explosion. So all the scientists were waiting for that explosion to come. It didnt come, while months were passing. Her speed of progress remained the same: slow and consistent. Curtiss said later on that it was not clear to (her) at all then that she would be so limited. If we look at the progression children normally make in forming a negative sentence: it starts with No have toy, then comes I not have toy and then the child forms the sentence I don (o) t have a toy.
Genie stayed stuck in that first three-word stage for years. Furthermore, she still could not ask a normal question. Wh-movement was a facility not present in Genies brain, which made it impossible for her to form a Wh-question. She could understand the questions though, but when she was pushed to form herself, she came with questions like I where is graham cracker on top shelf? . She also had a problem with pronouns: she did not distinguish between me and you. She never figured out who she was and who someone else, Rymer says in his book.
She could communicate extremely well though: whether it was with gestures, pictures, mime or homonyms. She would come when she was called for, however she could not call for anyone herself. Many scientists had to face her failure: Genie had levelled out in language learning almost immediately after she was discovered. Some scientists claimed that her failure was because she was retarded.
Curtiss does not believe this. She stated that Genie scored a perfect adult score on tests measuring her spatial capabilities. Furthermore, her mental age advanced a year for every year she had been out of isolation. This does not happen with retarded children. And she did progress: in March 1974 she combined two skills- fantasizing verbally and manipulating- to tell an outright lie. Furthermore, she started to use language to explain an event that had happened in the past.
She told the Rigler family in the late summer of 1974 about how her father had hit her with a stick. This answered the question of whether she would be able to explain events that had happened before language was part of her world. Later that year, Genie started to pay visits to her mother, whose eyesight had been completely restored. There now was tension between Irene and Marilyn Rigler, as well as between Jean Butler and the group of scientists.
Butler lobbied aggressively against Rigler, Hansen and Curtiss with anyone from the scientific community who would listen. She claimed that Genie was not as healthy and happy as had been claimed to be, and that she was most vibrant ever when she was staying with her. Then, when the research grant was not going to be continued with, she was transferred from foster-family to foster-family. Some of these families were abusive, and when one foster-mother tried to extract fecal material with an ice-cream stick, and she felt the world would invade the sovereignty of her body, she felt she could deprive the world of something herself: she did not speak for five months. Curtiss remained a frequent visitor, and she was told by Genie that Genie wanted to live at the Rigler's house again. In 1977 Curtiss and Fromkin received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their linguistic research.
They were now the only remaining scientists to be funded to work with Genie. Curtiss started to sort out all her research, notes and videos from Genies time at the Rigler's. She sorted out exactly what Genie had learned and what she hadnt. She found out that Genie had been developing a vocabulary, and she was able to put it in strings to express a complex idea. Although she tried, she never mastered grammar though. She could not use word endings, for instance.
She had a clear semantic ability but could not learn syntax, as Curtiss puts it. Furthermore, Genies linguistic system developed in bits and pieces, not all at once. This meant that grammar could be seen apart from all the other non-grammatical aspects of language, such as vocabulary etc. It could also be seen apart from other mental faculties. With her, unlike with normal children, language came forth separate from other cognition. With Genie it was seen that language and other cognitive tasks could develop independent from each other.
Genies inabilities bore out Lenneberg's theory, at least partly. She showed that simply being exposed to language did not mean one could still language after one had passed puberty. With her the learned skills, like vocabulary, were completely separated from what are supposed to be the innate skills, like syntax. Her semantic abilities had been burdened by her development.
These conclusions raised questions again. How could a child who had been shut away from language be deprived of the innate parts of language? Why was she unable to regain syntax Chomsky said she had been born with? The scientists were more or less able to find the answer in neurology.
The right hemisphere of the brain is used for creative things- listening to music, but also getting a joke and having a sense of what is and what is not appropriate to say in a conversation. The left hemisphere includes mathematics, logic and language. Both sides know the meanings of words. By puberty, the brain is more or less stable, in that all the critical periods have run their course: language, senses. Brain damage can interfere with acquisition of language early on, but if it happens during the critical period, other parts of the brain can fill in, Helen Neville, a neuroscientist at the Salk institute in La Jolla, california explains. She also explains that, for instance with deaf people language changes from the right hemisphere (which includes facial perception and should include sign language) to the left hemisphere, including language and logic.
Genies brain also seemed to be biased: she did well on tasks involving the right hemisphere, she failed the tasks for which she needed to use her left-hand brain. Curtiss performed a test on her to discover what was really going on: she played different things simultaneously into each of Genies ears (the left ear corresponds to the right hemisphere, the right ear corresponds to the left hemisphere) and measured each hemosphere's response. Each ear alone performed perfectly; both ears with the same sounds were OK, but when the two ears competed, the left ear (and right hemisphere) performed better. This is not very strange, but the degree of asymmetry found was striking. Genies brain was found to be processing language just as it did with environmental sounds: on the right hand of the brain.
It is normal for the brain to have a preference for one hemisphere. Genie did not just have a pronounced preference, she had an absolute preference. Curtiss explained that Genies case suggests the possibility that normal cerebral organization may depend on language development occurring at the appropriate time. () Lennebergs claimed that the brain organized language learning. Now it seems certain that stimulation is needed to organize the brain. She also said that language is the only stimulation that would do to organize the brain, and that Language is a logic system so organically tuned to the mechanism of the human brain that it actually triggers the brains growth. Early 1978, Curtiss says that Genie is now becoming confused and traumatized by the frequent moves.
She has been moved from one foster-family to the hospital, to another foster-family and back to the hospital. Then, on march 20 th, Genie is being transferred back to her biological mother. Rigler later claims Genies estate she had received after the death of her father, because he says he has given her lots of therapy and never has been paid for this. Soon afterward, Irene receives the book Curtiss has written about Genie, her family and her background. Irene feels her privacy is not being guarded, so she sues Curtiss with the help of Jean Butler. She accuses them if multiple infractions of patient- therapist and patient-physician confidentiality.
Too much information about Genies and Irene's personal life and background had been revealed by this book, she felt. One of her lawyers claims that Butler started the whole notion that Curtiss book was a violation of Irene's privacy, probably to take revenge on the scientists. The longer the case dragged on, the stronger the suspicion grew on the part of Irene's lawyers that they were contesting on marshy grounds. Her lawyers then withdrew from the case, and Irene represented herself in front of the lawyers. A settlement was made: Susan Curtiss was instructed to direct a programme for Genie of linguistic, neuro linguistic and neuropsychological evaluation and language instruction. Any income the scientists made was to be donated to Genies estate.
Genie now lives in a home for retarded adults, and visits her mother on one weekend in each month. With the exception of Jay Survey, none of the scientists has seen her. This is where the story ends; it is undoubtedly a sad story, though we have learned something from it. When the brain has not received enough stimulation in the form of language during the critical period, it can still learn words, but it can not conquer syntax anymore. The brain is then not capable of growing in a way that is needed for it to learn grammar anymore. Bibliography: Bibliography: Russ Rymer: Genie, A Scientific Tragedy.
Penguin Books. Written account of the video Secret of a Wild Child.
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Research essay sample on Critical Period Left Hemisphere
