She certainly gave science a wish or two...

November 4th, 1970. A middle-aged woman and her mother came into a welfare office in Temple City, California, carrying a small girl who looked to the officer to be just 6 or 7. She was in reality 13, and had lived a life of severe abuse. Genie (real name protected by law), a very unfortunate victim of abuse, was kept locked in a room alone for over 10 years. While awake, she was tied to a potty chair, and slept in a crib with her hands restricted. Her father, who was mentally unstable himself, regarded Genie as a retarded child, and considered his ritual abuse as a way of protecting her.

Genie's peculiar bunny-like walk shocked her rescuers, in which she held her arms like paws in front of her, and walked haltingly. She wasn't toilet-trained, could focus to only a few feet in front of her, could not eat solid foods and spat constantly, and the only words she said were 'stopit' and 'nomore'.

Genie is a feral child, one of several cases of children who have lived many of their formative years without the nurturing environment of a human society. Her case shocked and saddened millions of people, and she found a lot of well-wishers. However, Genie also provided a lot of evidence and food for thought for linguists. She provided a unique, albeit extremely unfortunate case study to investigate the Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that the period from about two years till puberty is critical to the learning of language in a child, and if that period is missed, the child doesn't learn language as proficiently as a normal child would. An easy-to-see support of this hypothesis is that most of us, who have been brought up in a place where the language spoken is not our own, pick up the foreign language with native-like proficiency, whereas our parents still grapple with words and constructions, in spite of being exposed for the same time.

Psychologists, linguists and neurobiologists tracked Genie's progress. During her rehabilition, she was very eager to learn new words, pointing at them until someone told her what the object was called. She rapidly progressed; her acqusition seemed to be just a delayed version (about 12 years) of that of a normal child, only faster! She went through the natural initial phases of language acquisition, until she was stuck at the multiword phrase. Genie just couldn't go beyond saying phrases like "Applesauce buy store" and "No have toy". At the same time, her caretakers were amazed at how quickly she picked up maths and how well she could express abstract thoughts through drawing. It is said that the scientists working with Genie fell in love with her innocence, and often would spend entire days with her.

In Genie's case, however, the Critical Period Hypothesis could not be verified conclusively. Evidence of brain damage was found, although no one was sure whether her brain was damaged from birth or because of the brutal treatment she recieved in her earlier years. It wasn't sure anymore whether her block in acquisition was due to her passing the critical age, or due to the brain damage. In any case, the experiment was scrapped, and today Genie lives in a foster home in southern California.

The case study of Genie was fascinating, but also very controversial. Her mother, and a whole lot of people, ended up thinking that the experimentation on Genie was detrimental to her being rehabilitated and science should have left the poor girl alone, but scientists maintain that they loved Genie like she was their own child. What struck me the most was simply that there was an actual word for children like Genie - 'feral children'... which means it happens often enough to require a name! Depressing...

The movie Mockingbird Don't Sing is based on Genie. Although not an excellent movie, it is worth a watch.