Genie and Language Acquisition

1
Genie and Language Acquisition

• How children learn to speak and what happens once
  they pass the critical period without having done
  so.

2
Infants 0-10 mos.

• Infants can distinguish sounds from birth, even
  if those sounds are not part of their parents
  speech.
• By six months, babies begin to lump together
  sounds into phonemes and separate them so that
  their language keeps separate.
• By ten months, they cease to distinguish sounds
  from different languages that are not present in
  their own.

3
Physical Development for Speech

• During their first year, babies bodies change so
  that they can speak.
• Their larynx comes up, which forces the baby to
  breathe through the nose so that they can drink
  and breathe at the same time.
• The larynx descends deep into the throat, opening
  the pharynx that allows the tongue to produce
  vowels.

4
Stages in Language Learning

• Between five and seven months, babies begin to
  play with sounds and their vocal noises begin to
  sound like consonants and vowels.
• Between seven and eight months they begin to
  babble in real syllables.
• Around their first birthday, they begin to
  understand and produce words.

5
Speed Learning

• At around eighteen months, a babys vocabulary
  will jump to the rate of a new-word-every-two-hour
  s minimum that the child will maintain through
  adolescence.
• Syntax also begins here with strings of two word
  sentences.
• In 95 of the case, their words are in the right
  order.

6
The Sesame Street Experiment

• A voiceover said, OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS
  TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER! FIND BIG BIRD TICKLING
  COOKIE MONSTER!!
• The children must have understood the meaning of
  the ordering of words because they looked more at
  the screen that depicted the sentence of the
  voiceover afterwards.
• Even before they can put two words together,
  babies can comprehend a sentence using its
  syntax.

7
Growing Up

• As babies get older, their speech gets more
  complex, as soon, they find themselves able to
  embed one constituent inside another.
• By the age of three, children use function words
  in over 90 of the sentences that require them.

8
Picking Up Language

• Without already knowing the language, its
  difficult for a child to figure out what the
  characters on television are talking about.
• When they listen to their parents, for example,
  children are able to guess at what the parents
  are saying, especially when they already know a
  lot of the content words, based on their bodily
  gestures.
• Much of what we learn is from conversation.

9
The Critical Period

• From the around the ages of 3 to 12.
• Language can be acquired until puberty, at which
  the ability to learn language slows down rapidly.
  
• Cases in which people make it to puberty without
  having learned a language are rare, but they all
  point to the same conclusion they never learn it
  as well as those who learned it as children.

10
After the Critical Period

• Children who are found in the woods or in the
  homes of psychotic parents after puberty
  sometimes develop a vocabulary.
• However, they are permanently incapable of
  mastering the full grammar of their language.
• Acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed
  for children up to the age of six, is steadily
  compromised from then until shortly after
  puberty, and is extremely rare thereafter.

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Saved During the Critical Period

• When children are discovered before they hit
  puberty, however, they have a much better chance
  of learning the full grammar.
• Isabelle was six and a half when she and her
  mute, brain-damaged mother escaped from the her
  grandfathers house, where they were imprisoned.
  A year and a half later she had learned 1500-2000
  words and could produce complex grammatical
  sentences such as
• Do you go to Miss Masons school at the
  university?
• Why does the paste come out if one upsets the jar?

12
Genie

• Genie was discovered in 1970 at the age of
  thirteen and seven months in a Los Angeles
  suburb.
• She was confined up until that point by her
  controlling father, who abused her regularly.
• Because she had not acquired language up until
  that point, linguists used her to test the
  critical period theory.

13
When Genie was Found

• When Genie was first found, they couldnt tell at
  first whether or not she had already acquired
  language and simply wasnt using it or if she
  indeed had not acquired language.
• Because she did not respond to simple commands
  but did respond to words that were clearly out of
  the context of their environment, it was
  determined that Genie truly had not yet acquired
  language.

14
Initial Observations about Genie

• When she was first discovered, most of the sounds
  that came out of her mouth were voiceless.
• Normal people learn very early in life how to
  speak and breathe at the same time. Genie,
  however, never learned how to do so.

15
First Words

• Genies first basic words were monosyllabic
  consonant-vowel sequences.
• After five months, she began to use single words
  spontaneously.
• Her early vocabulary was different from the first
  words of regular children which are typically
  nouns, plus particles like up and down.

16
How she was taught to Speak

• The tests that were created to show Genies
  progress in learning showed that Genie was
  acquiring language, but not through imitation or
  prescribed rules.
• Genie learned plurals by learning to match the
  test pictures with a string of the following
  sort 1NS, 2NS, etc. So if Curtiss, one of
  the members of the team who worked with her, said
  three dishes, Genie would construct the string
  3 dish S. In five lessons, Genie had mastered the
  plural concept.

17
The Differences that Kept her Separate

• There are a few major differences between her and
  regular children who acquire language as babies
• Her vocabulary was different and much larger than
  that of children at the same stage of syntactic
  development.
• The rate of her syntactic acquisition was much
  slower than normal.

18
Results

• Genie eventually learned to produce immature,
  pidgin like sentences such as
• Mike Paint.
• Applesauce buy store.
• I like elephant eat peanut.
• Neal come happy Neal not come sad.

19
Other Explanations for Lack of Speech

• Some hypothesize that the reason why people like
  Genie never learn to speak successfully is
  because they have emotional scars that interfere
  somehow with their ability to learn.

20
However

• Chelsea was born deaf in a remote town in
  Northern California.
• At the age of 31, she was referred to a
  neurologist who fitted her with hearing aids that
  improved her hearing to near-normal levels.
• She now knows two thousand words and has become
  social and independent.
• She never learned proper syntax, though.

21
Results

• The paper on Genie was published as they were
  still teaching Genie to talk, so it ends by
  saying that they have yet to learn whether or not
  it is true that learning to speak after the
  critical period is impossible.
• Time proved that the critical period theory was
  correct. Eventually, Genie stopped improving and
  shortly thereafter, her mother placed a
  restraining order on the team that was working
  with her. She currently resides in a home for
  mentally retarded adults.

22
Sources

• Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William
  Morrow and Company, 1994.
• Curtiss, Susan. Fromkin, Victoria. Krashen,
  Stephen. Rigler, David. Rigler, Marylyn. "The
  Linguistic Development of Genie." Language
  Journal of the Linguistic Society of America 50,
  3(September 1974) 528-54.