Chapter 4

Wild and isolated

children and the
critical age issue for
language learning
Provided by:
Hossein Chahkandi
Amir Taheri Fard
 introduction
 people have always wondered about whether language is something
that is as natural to humans as walking and smiling or not.

 People have wondered that is it possible for children to produce speech

on their own without experiencing a language.

 People are interested in knowing about the critical period, is there an

age beyond which a person is unable to learn a first or a second
language.

 wild or feral children: Over the past few centuries there have been a
number of cases reported on children raised by wolves, dogs, pigs,
sheep, and other animals. These children are known as wild or feral
children

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 There are some stories about children being raised by
animals, such as the story of two girls raised by wolves
in India (Singh and Zingg, 1942), and the recent cases
of Ukrainian children who survived with dogs.

 Some studies are conducted on children raised by

wolves, dogs, pigs, sheep, and other animals and some
others are conducted on children who have been kept
in confinement or isolation by their parents or others,
and consequently were not exposed to language

 Studying such cases might provide insight into certain

psycholinguistic questions.

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 Genie

Isabelle Victor

Interesting
stories about
Wild and
isolated children

Helen
Chelsea
Keller

Oxana
and
Edik

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 Victor: the Wild Boy of Aveyron

it’s the story of a boy was captured by hunters in the woods

near the village of Saint-Sernin in the Aveyron district of
France.

The boy appeared to be 11 or 12 years old, was naked except

for what was left of a tattered shirt, and he made no sounds
other than guttural animal-like noises. He seemed to have
survived on his own for years in the wild. Probably he had
been abandoned originally, but at what age or by whom could
not be spicified.

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Itard tries teaching speech but fails

 the boy’s education was assigned to an

eager educator, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard.

 Itard set up goals that included social as well

as language training

 The Wild Boy was given the name ‘Victor’ by

Itard
 Itard started his training by intensive variety
of games and activities that designed to
socialize Victor and make him aware of the
world around him.

 They had a dramatic positive effect.

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 Speech training with Victor was really frustrating for
Itard

 Itard tried to get Victor to repeat some words and

speech sounds

 After a while victor was able to distinguish speech

sounds from other sounds in the environment and
he was even able to differentiate the sounds of
normal speech from the poorly pronounced speech
sounds made by the deaf children in the institute.

 Finally Victor could learn and repeat some sounds

like “li”, the contraction form of name “julie” and the
phrase ‘Oh Dieu!’ means (Oh God!), and the word
for milk (lait in French)

 but he couldn’t really use the word in a

communicative sense, such as asking for milk.

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 Itard tries reading and writing with success
 Itard decided to abandon attempts to teach
Victor language by speech imitation and
moved on to another of his goals, to sharpen
the boy’s perceptual abilities.

 He taught victor to match colors and shapes,

and then match drawings with the objects
they represented.

 Then he taught Victor the letters of the

alphabet using letters on individual cards. The
boy learned the milk word lait again, but this
time in the form of alphabetic letters.


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 Eventually, he made progress in reading. Initially,
Victor took written words such as ‘book’ to mean a
specific object, a particular book, and eventually he
learned to associate the words with classes of
objects, in this example, all books.

 Victor also went through some of the same

problems of overgeneralization that ordinary
children go through in learning a language for
example, a knife to be ‘razor

 He learned adjectives such as ‘big’ and ‘small’, ‘hot’

and ‘cold’, and a variety of color words. He also
learned verbs such as ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘touch’, and
‘throw’.

 In less than a year, Itard was able to issue a report

stating that he could read and write to some extent

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Itard tries again at speech, fails, then gives up
Itard devoted five years to Victor. Near the end of
that period, he tried once again to teach the boy to
speak. These attempts failed too; soon afterwards
Itard decided to end his work with Victor. He
arranged for Victor to live in a house with Madame
Guérin. Victor lived there for 18 years, continuing
to be mute until his death in 1828 at the age of
about 38.The interested reader is urged to view
the excellent movie, The Wild Child,
 “
Genie: raised in isolation

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Genie is discovered at 13 years of age, brutally abused
 It’s a sad story about a poor girl who was isolated from the
outside environment and mistreated.
 Genie (a pseudonym) was discovered in the early 1970s in the
Los Angeles area of California.
 She was 13 years old and had been locked in a small room in
her house by her father for the preceding 12 years!
 During the day she had been kept naked except for a harness
that held her to an infant’s toilet seat. At night she was put into
a sleeping bag and placed in a covered sleeping bed that was
in effect a cage.
 She was fed but never spoken to.
 Her father beat her frequently with a wooden stick and growled
at her like a dog.

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 Genie’s mother eventually escaped, taking
the child with her. It was in this way that the
case was discovered by the authorities.

 As for the father, he committed suicide on

the day he was to be put on trial for
mistreating the child.

 At the time of her discovery, Genie was in a

pitiful physical condition and appeared to
have no language.

 Based on the information later provided by

her mother, the girl had started to begin to
acquire language just prior to her
confinement, when she was around 20
months of age.

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Genie is given freedom and care

 Like Victor, during her first few weeks of freedom Genie was alert
and curious and could display some ability to understand and even
imitate some individual words, such as ‘mother’, ‘red’, and ‘bunny’.

 However she had little comprehension of grammatical structures.

Generally, she responded only to gestures and to the intonation of
words.

 psychological tests indicated that her cognitive abilities were little

more than those of a 2-year-old.

 After just a few months of care, however, Genie changed

considerably. She grew, gained weight and strength, and was able
to go on long walks.

 While her original speech production had been limited to a few

utterances such as ‘No-more’ and ‘Stop it’, by the end of a few
months she had acquired the words for hundreds of objects.

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Genie responds linguistically and socially

 After about a year had passed since she was first discovered, Genie
was evaluated again on her language ability (Curtiss, 1977).

 She was tested, for example, on a variety of syntactic structures,

such as her understanding of simple negation, and could respond
correctly to sentences like ‘Show me the bunny that does not have
a carrot’ as opposed to ‘Show me the bunny that has a carrot’.

 She was tested on her understanding of adjectives, such as ‘big’

and ‘little’ (‘Point to the big circle’).

 She was required to place objects with respect to other objects,

e.g. ‘in’, ‘under’, ‘next to’, ‘behind’, to see if she understood the
relationships expressed by those prepositions.

 It was found that Genie’s ability to understand speech had

improved quite rapidly, although her progress in speech production
was very slow and continued to be slow.

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Genie reaches a peak in language learning

 Genie’s language learning was studied for about

eight years and her language ability made little
progress.

 Her language ability, both in terms of understanding

and production, remained well below normal and her
speech continued to be ungrammatical.

 Genie, like Victor, was not able to acquire a normal

level of language despite receiving a great amount of
care, attention, instruction, and linguistic input.

 Genie was finally placed in a home for retarded

adults, where she now lives (Rymer, 1993). This was
the end of the scientific collection of data on Genie’s
linguistic or other development.

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Isabelle: confinement
with a mute mother

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 Isabelle’s background
 story of a girl who was confined with her mother
 she didn’t learn language until she was found at the age
of 6 years old
 Isabelle’s mother had sustained a brain injury at the age
of 2, and as a result never developed speech
 Isabelle’s mother was wholly uneducated. She could
neither talk, nor read, nor write
 She communicated with her family by means of crude
gestures of her own origination
 Isabelle was born when her mother was 22 years old
 During the period of her pregnancy, Isabelle's grandfather
kept her and her deaf mother confined to a dark room
 Isabelle Crawled on her hands and knees
 Made grunting, animal like sounds
 Isabelle’s progress

 She made progress in vocalization just one week after Mason

visited with her.
 Somehow she could say words like “toy’ and “ball” in response to
real object presented by Mason
 Her first voluntarily sentences: That’s my baby; I love my baby;
open your eyes; close your eyes; I don’t know; I don’t want; that’s
funny; it’s mine (when another child attempted to take one of her
toys).
 After just one year, when she listens to a story, She retells the
story in her own limited vocabulary, bringing out the main points
 After a year and a half, she represent WH questions, embedded
sentences, conditional conjoining, and proper tensing!
 after only 20 months, Isabelle ‘has progressed from her first
spoken word to full length sentences
 a remarkable achievement that was so different from the
outcomes with Victor and Genie
 Chelsea: began to learn
language at age 32

When she was born, her family thought that she was deaf

She did not receive any language training or instruction

Chelsea grew up in a warm family environment

At age 32, it was discovered that she was not generally deaf

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Chelsea’s Language Development

Developing

Broad

Vocabulary Unlike
Genie

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 Some of the utterances that Chelsea has produced

1) The small a the hat.

2) Orange Tim car in.
3) I Wanda be drive come.
4) Breakfast eating girl.
5) Richard eat peppers hot.
6) Banana the eat.

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 As a
result
Chelsea was
unable to
produce
grammatically
correct
utterances
“

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Keller became deaf and
blind when she was 19
months.

She could partially

produce and
comprehend language.

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At age 7, Anne
Sullivan Mackey
came to teach
Hellen language

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Helen learns language

Macy was successful in

teaching Helen language
through the sense of
touch

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28
29
Oxana and Edik:
raised by dogs

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 First Language Learning

A
Critical
Age? 31
Exposure to language
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 Two major factors
governing language
learning

Exposure Extent of
to non-linguistic
language trauma

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 The achievements of
Isabelle and Helen

The affection and

social support which
Both of them had Why were both Helen and Isabelle
these two were able to experience
a loving family
girls able to
learn
language
well?
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 Is there a critical age for
first-language learning?

To rely on the cases of Victor, Genie, and Chelsea to make a

case for critical age is surely not warranted. There are too
many unknown factors and the data, particularly for Genie
and Chelsea, are not clear. Certainly, the critical age, if there
is one, could not be much younger than 6 or 7 years since
that would exclude Isabelle and Helen, who in fact did learn
language after that age.
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