When the circumstances of Genie, the primary victim in one of the most severe cases of abuse, neglect and social isolation on record in medical literature, first became known in early November 1970, authorities arranged for her admission to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where doctors determined that at the age of 13 years and 7 months, she had not acquired a first language.
Their studies enabled them to publish several academic works examining theories and hypotheses regarding the proposed critical period during which humans learn to understand and use language.
The size of her vocabulary and the speed with which she expanded it consistently outstripped anticipations, and many of the earliest words she learned and used were very different from typical first-language learners and strongly indicated that she possessed highly developed cognitive abilities.
[2][13][14] Genie was the last, and second surviving, of four children of parents living in Arcadia, California, and was born in 1957 without any noted complications at a normal weight and size; the following day she showed signs of Rh incompatibility and required a blood transfusion, but had no sequelae and was otherwise described as healthy.
[15][16][17] Due to treatment for a congenital hip dislocation, which required her to wear a highly restrictive Frejka splint from the age of 4+1⁄2 to 11 months, she was late to walk, causing her father to decide that she was severely mentally retarded.
[18][4] Genie spent almost all of her childhood locked alone in a bedroom with almost no environmental stimuli, where her father left her severely malnourished and almost always kept her either strapped to a child's toilet or bound inside a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized.
[4][20] He refused to speak to or to be around her, beating her with a plank he kept in her room if she made any sound or showed any emotion, and to discourage her from making any outward expression he would bare his teeth and bark and growl at her like a dog while scratching her.
Audiometry tests confirmed Genie had regular hearing in both ears, doctors found no physical or mental deficiencies explaining her lack of speech, and her few existing medical records did not contain any definitive diagnoses.
[4][26][27] Based on a series of daytime observations and sleep studies that Jay Shurley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist in extreme social isolation, conducted in the first 18 months after her admission, doctors definitively ruled out the possibility that Genie was autistic or had any brain damage.
[4][28][29] From the time of Genie's admission doctors saw she clearly picked up some nonverbal information, with Kent emphasizing that she seemed very intent on looking at peoples' faces and made decent eye contact, further noting that she showed a small amount of responsiveness to it even in the absence of language.
[4][35] Genie's comprehension and production of these few words demonstrated that she distinguished speech from other environmental sounds and could hear individual phonemes when listening to people talking, two critical early components of language acquisition.
[9][68][69] Curtiss noted Genie's focus on objective properties, and especially her knowledge of color words, was very unusual because these require a level of cognitive sophistication not present in young children, suggesting she developed mental mechanisms for categorization during childhood.
Soon after moving in with Butler, Genie, who had turned 14 while living at Children's Hospital, showed the first signs of reaching puberty, definitively putting her past Lenneberg's proposed critical period.
[c][4][105] Some utterances from this time until the end of 1973, such as "Elevator hurt silly goose", were completely unintelligible, and a few of these, such as "Angry burn stove", were subject–subject–subject sentences previously observed in children with various language disorders.
[112][111] By this time she could also use two-word noun phrases, such as "piece wood", in different contexts, but a later analysis by linguist Derek Bickerton speculated that she treated all of these as single words in her vocabulary.
Even after learning the present progressive she inconsistently gave correct responses to it on tests, and use of the suffix -ing was the only way Genie modified a sentence without changing any of the base words.
Although Genie had gained some understanding of number words during her initial stay at Children's Hospital she only began to count in sequential order in late 1972, always in very deliberate and laborious manner, and her progress was extremely slow.
[f][5][122][128] Researchers noted she began using imperatives much later in the language acquisition process than normal and that they remained very infrequent, and considered either her emotional difficulties or lack of self-concept possible explanations.
The scientists wrote her lack of comprehension or use of auxiliary structures, despite understanding identical messages phrased with inflected words, was consistent with her ability to grasp conceptual information far better than grammar.
The words she learned continued to remain far ahead of the grammar she possessed and still showed an unusual focus on objective properties, and the gap between her receptive and expressive vocabulary had grown.
While her use and comprehension of grammar had clearly improved, and papers from the time indicated she was continuing to acquire it, they were still highly deficient and her progress remained far slower than linguists had anticipated.
[203] Some of Genie's pronunciation rules and limitations were characteristic of typical General American English speakers, and her progress with learning to pronounce individual phonemes followed relatively normal patterns for a first-language learner, but many others were highly atypical.
[228][226] Genie gradually began to outwardly exhibit more of her emotions, and for reasons the scientists never managed to discern she maintained her unexplained ability to communicate her desires to complete strangers without words.
[9][242][243] Soon after Genie moved into this foster home the people running it began subjecting her to extreme physical and emotional abuse, causing her language skills to rapidly regress and making her return to her coping mechanism of silence.
In early January 1978 Curtiss wrote a letter in which she stated these moves were all very hard on Genie, causing continued regression in all aspects of her life, and that their frequency heightened their traumatic impact.
Instead, she argued that Genie provided evidence for a gradual variation of it; that although some degree of acquisition can occur beyond puberty, permitting some form of ability to communicate using language, it would never progress into normal-sounding speech.
By contrast, in both previous and subsequent studies, people with the same conditions who began acquiring language in their right hemispheres prior to the end of the critical period had developed normal vocabulary and grammar.
[274] Some of the scientists who worked with Genie, including Jay Shurley, concluded based on non-linguistic evidence that she had been mentally retarded from birth, and argued this rendered it impossible to be completely certain about the utility of studying her language acquisition.
[9][28][275] However, the linguists who studied Genie firmly believed that she possessed at least average intelligence at birth, and argued that the abuse and isolation she suffered during her childhood had left her functionally retarded.
[256] The scientists acknowledged that Genie's extreme emotional difficulties may have contributed to delaying her acquisition and willingness to use a few specific pieces of grammar, and may have partially explained her very tacit demeanor when she began receiving care.