[citation needed] Both parents were employed (although later characterized by The San Diego Tribune as living on "food stamps and welfare") and spent many hours away from home.
[4] Their father later stated in interviews that he realized the girls had invented a language of their own, but, since their use of English remained extremely rudimentary, he had decided that they were, as the doctor suggested, developmentally challenged and that it would do no good to send them to school.
[2] At the Children's Hospital of San Diego, in California, speech therapists Ann Koeneke and Alexa Kratze discovered that Virginia and Grace had invented a complex idioglossia.
[5] The twins' language was characterized by an extremely fast tempo and a staccato rhythm, traits the girls transferred to their spoken English following speech therapy.
A follow-up as they approached the age of 30 revealed that Virginia worked on an assembly line in a supervised job training center, while Grace mopped floors at the fast-food restaurant McDonald's.