Susan Curtiss

Susan Curtiss, born in 1949, is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics is closely tied to the study of language development in psychology. Her 1976 doctoral dissertation, supervised by Victoria Fromkin, studied the grammatical development of Genie, a girl discovered in 1970 after years of extreme isolation. Curtiss found that Genie learned vocabulary quickly but acquired very little syntax, and the case became central evidence for a critical period for first language acquisition. She later studied Chelsea, a deaf woman who first received hearing aids at 32, who likewise built vocabulary but not consistent grammar. Her wider interests include grammatical development in children with specific language impairment and the modularity of grammar. The Genie research has also drawn ethical criticism, which the article reports alongside her own and her colleagues replies.