13 Temple University Japan Proceedings of the 2006 Colloquium on Language Learning “Genie” and Her Implications Jeremiah B. Dutch Abstract This paper will discuss “Genie” (and briefly two other “wild” children). I will outline her case, the implications for language acquisition and the ethical dilemmas involved. Finally I will suggest an alternative approach to future cases like Genie that may be both ethical and valuable in terms of first and second language acquisition research. Introduction In 1970 one of the most famous “wild” children in history emerged from the most unlikely of places—suburban Los Angeles. Scientists have named her “Genie,” although that is not her real name. From the age of 20 months Genie experienced possibly the worst form of child abuse - near total isolation. One television documentary reports she was “locked in a room and tied to a potty chair for most of her life ... she had little to look at and no one to talk to for more than ten years” (Secret of the Wild Child, 1997, p.1). Eventually Genie’s near-blind mother, Irene, herself abused, went to the authorities. Rescued at the age of thirteen and nine months, Genie was unable to speak. Moreover she seemed never to have learned how to be human. Genie’s birth and discovery coincided astonishingly closely to two major events in psycholinguistics, the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 and ten years later Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. But the television documentary comments, “One of the strangest chapters of this story is the timing of the premiere, for Trufaut’s movie about history’s most famous wild child opened exactly one week after Genie was discovered.” (p. 5) he ilm and its subject were an inspiration to many involved with Genie’s case. In fact it is nearly impossible to discuss Genie without mentioning her famous predecessor. L’Enfant Sauvage [he Wild Child] (1970) is about Victor who, like Genie, was around thirteen and deprived of language. Unlike Genie, he was probably unable to talk properly due to a throat wound. his detail should not be overlooked. He was found with a long scar on his neck. Unlike Genie, Victor was a true wild child. He was discovered in the woods around Averyon, France in 1800 and placed under the care of a young doctor named Jean-Marc- Gaspard Itard. One might imagine Itard’s methods, with Victor, would be primitive compared to today’s standards, and certainly they were. According to Rymer (1993), Itard: challenged his trust by terrorizing him with a Leyden jar (a sort of battery that can deliver a shock) and unfairly punishing him over his lessons to test his sense of justice. Victor knew enough about justice to be outraged, and Itard found the outrage edifying. Under Itard’s aggressive instruction (he once dangled the boy from a fifth-story window to frighten him out of his recalcitrance), Victor made some hard-won headway. He learned to spell the French word for milk, and on visits to a neighbor’s home would take along appropriate letters from the institute’s metal teaching alphabet so that he could spell out ‘L-A-I-T’ while downing a glass of it. But he never learned to talk (pp. 53-54). While the ilm version of Victor’s life ends optimistically, in real life Victor’s progress, like Genie’s, slowed down considerably and Itard eventually abandoned the pupil that made him famous. Both stories are profoundly sad, but Genie’s might be the saddest. Despite all of our modern knowledge, Genie, after her discovery, was, in some ways, treated worse than Victor. One reason perhaps is because there still doesn’t seem to be any real