The Case of Genie

In 1970 a Los Angeles social worker discovered a thirteen-year-old girl, given the pseudonym Genie in the scientific literature, who had been kept in near-total isolation by her parents for most of her childhood, largely confined to a small room, restrained to a potty chair or crib, and deprived of normal social contact, sunlight and language. Genie could not stand upright, chew solid food or speak more than a few words when she was found, and researchers who studied her afterward saw in her case a rare and ethically unrepeatable opportunity to examine the critical period hypothesis, the idea that human language must be acquired within a biologically limited early window or it cannot be fully acquired at all. Over the following years, as Genie was studied intensively by linguists and psychologists, she made substantial progress in nonverbal communication, and steadily expanded her vocabulary, but she never progressed beyond simple, mostly ungrammatical phrases and was never able to reliably apply grammatical rules such as word order and verb tense in the way a native speaker acquiring language in early childhood normally would. Genie's case became one of the most cited pieces of evidence for a critical or sensitive period in human language development, even as the ethical circumstances of her discovery, subsequent care and use as a research subject remain a source of continuing controversy.