In 1970, a wild child was found in California. Genie, now 24, has stirred up new questions about language and intelligence.”
Only a few cases are recorded of human beings who have grown up without any real contact with other humans. So rare is the phenom_enon that when a 12-year-old “wild boy” was found in the forest of Aveyron in 18th-century France, the government ordered him brought to Paris to be examined by doctors in an institution for deaf-mutes. There he came under the care of the physician Jean Itard, who also acted as the boy’s tutor. Itard left detailed records of his experience, which was later dramatized in the 1970 movie The Wild Child. Although the boy was not deaf, and despite Itard’s work, the child never learned to speak.
In 1970, a wild child was found in California: a girl of 13 who had been isolated in a small room and had not been spoken to by her parents since infancy. “Genie,” as she was later dubbed to protect her privacy by the psycholinguists who tested her, could not stand erect. At the time, she was unable to speak: she could only whimper.
The case came to light when Genie’s 50-year-old mother ran away from her 70-year-old husband after a violent quarrel and took the child along. The mother was partially blind and applied for public assistance. The social worker in the welfare office took one look at Genie and called her supervisor, who called the police. Genie was sent to the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital for tests. Charges of willful abuse were filed against both her parents, according to the Los Angeles Times. On the day he was due to appear in court, however, Genie’s father shot himself to death. He left a note in which he wrote. “The world will never understand.”
The discovery of Genie aroused intense curiosity among psycholo_gists, linguists, neurologists, and others who study brain develop_ment. They were eager to know what Genie’s mental level was at the time she was found and whether she would be capable of developing her faculties. “It’s a terribly important case,” says Harlan Lane, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University who wrote The Wild Boy ofAveyron. “Since our morality doesn’t allow us to conduct depriva_tion experiments with human beings, these unfortunate people are all we have to go on.”
