Genie

Genie (born 1957 ) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone to interact with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California.

Psychologists, linguists, and other scientists almost immediately focused a great deal of attention on Genie's case. Upon determining that she had not yet learned language, linguists saw her as providing an opportunity to gain further insight into the processes controlling language acquisition skills and to test theories and hypotheses identifying critical periods during which humans learn to understand and use language. Throughout the time scientists studied Genie, she made substantial advances in her overall mental and psychological development. Within months, she developed exceptional nonverbal communication skills and gradually learned some basic social skills, but even by the end of their case study, she still exhibited many behavioral traits characteristic of an unsocialized person. She also continued to learn and use new language skills throughout the time they tested her, but ultimately remained unable to fully acquire a first language. As a young child, Genie's mother sustained a severe head injury in an accident, giving her lingering neurological damage that caused degenerative vision problems in one eye. Genie's father mostly grew up in orphanages in the American Pacific Northwest. His father was killed by a lightning strike, and his mother ran a brothel while infrequently seeing him. Additionally, his mother gave him a feminine first name, which made him the target of constant derision. As a result, he harbored extreme resentment toward his mother during childhood, which Genie's brother and the scientists who studied Genie believed was the cause of his subsequent anger problems. At times she claimed that at an unspecified point Genie spoke individual words, though she could not recall them, but at other times she said that Genie had never produced any speech. Researchers never determined which was the truth.

Six months later, when Genie was 20 months old, her paternal grandmother was killed in a hit and run traffic accident. Her death affected Genie's father far beyond normal levels of grief, and because his son had been walking with her, he held him responsible, further heightening his anger. Shurley concluded she was not autistic, with which other doctors who worked with her during that time and later researchers concurred; he noted that she had a high level of emotional disturbance, but wrote that her eagerness for new stimuli and lack of behavioral defense mechanisms were uncharacteristic of autism. and could engage in deferred imitation of non-language activity. Her physical health also continued to improve, and by this time her endurance had dramatically increased. Her social behavior was still highly abnormal, and doctors were especially concerned that she almost never interacted with people in her age group, but evaluations from the time expressed some optimism about her prognosis.

First foster home In June 1971, Jean Butler, Genie's special education teacher, obtained permission to take Genie on day trips to her home in Country Club Park, Los Angeles. Near the end of that month, after one of these trips, Butler told the hospital that she might have contracted rubella, to which Genie would have been exposed. Hospital staff were reluctant to give foster custody to her and were very skeptical of her story, strongly suspecting she had concocted it as part of a bid to take over as Genie's guardian and primary caretaker, but decided that placing her in an isolation ward at the hospital could potentially be highly damaging to her social and psychological development, so they agreed to temporarily quarantine her in Butler's home. The Nova documentary on Genie, however, states the rejection of Butler came partially on the hospital's recommendation; there is evidence many hospital authorities, including Hansen, felt her ability to care for Genie was inadequate, and hospital policy forbade its staff members from becoming foster parents of its patients. Researchers therefore concluded that Genie was acquiring language in the right hemisphere of her brain, and definitively ruled out the possibility that her language lateralization was only reversed. The scientists also noted in 1974 that she seemed to be able to recognize the location she was in and was good at getting from one place to another, an ability which primarily involves the right hemisphere. The afterword of the 1994 edition of the book, written in November 1993, detailed conversations he had with Genie's mother—who had since gone blind again, from glaucoma—just before and after the publication of his magazine articles. At that time she told him that Genie had recently moved into a more supportive foster home which permitted regular visits, and said that she was happy and, although hard to understand, was significantly more verbal.

Several people who worked with Genie, including Curtiss and Kent, harshly criticized Rymer's works. His letter also stated that he and Marilyn were in contact with her mother and had recently reestablished contact with Genie, who he said had immediately recognized and greeted him and Marilyn by name, and that, "My wife and I have resumed our (now infrequent) visits with Genie and her mother." The news stories also included the only public interview with her brother, who was then living in Ohio; he said that since leaving the Los Angeles area, he had visited her and their mother only once, in 1982, and had refused to watch or read anything about her life until just prior to the interview, but had heard she was doing well.

Impact Genie is one of the best-known case studies of delayed language acquisition in a child outside of studies on deaf children. Susan Curtiss argued that, even if humans possess the innate ability to acquire language, Genie demonstrated the necessity of early language stimulation in the left hemisphere of the brain to start.

Ethical dispute During the grant meetings in May 1971, some of the scientists, including Jay Shurley and David Elkind, voiced concern that the prevailing methods of research pursued scientific study at the expense of Genie's well-being and could cause love and attention to be contingent on her language acquisition. Shurley said that there was strong disagreement during the initial grant meetings and the atmosphere grew increasingly tense and bitter, especially noting that the later meetings excluded all non-scientists and thereby shunned valuable input from some of the hospital staff who had worked most closely with Genie. The scientists' footage in Nova showed from the case study archives had significantly deteriorated, and required restoration for use in the documentary. In addition to Rymer's magazine articles and book, he said that he drew on her life and his experience researching her case for the theme of his 2013 novel Paris Twilight.