Linguistic development of Genie

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 came to light 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.^[1][2][3] Hospital staff then began teaching Genie to speak General American English, and she gradually began to learn language. Their efforts soon caught the attention of linguists, who saw her as an important way to gain further insight into acquisition of language skills and linguistic development. Starting in late May 1971, UCLA professor Victoria Fromkin headed a team of linguists who began a detailed case study on Genie's progress with learning language. One of Fromkin's graduate students, Susan Curtiss, became especially involved in testing and recording Genie's linguistic development. Linguists' observations of Genie began that month, and in October of that year they began actively testing what principles of language she had acquired and was acquiring. 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.^[3][4][5]

On broader levels Genie followed some of the normal patterns of young children acquiring a first language, but researchers noted many marked differences with her linguistic development. The size of her vocabulary and the speed with which she expanded it consistently outstripped all 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. By contrast, she had far more difficulty with acquiring and utilizing grammar. She clearly mastered some basic aspects of grammar, and understood significantly more than she used in her own speech, but her rate of grammar acquisition was much slower than normal. As a result, her vocabulary was consistently much more advanced and sophisticated than most people in equivalent phases of grammar acquisition. Researchers attributed some of her abnormal expressive language to physical difficulties she faced with speech production, and worked very hard to improve her ability to speak. Within months of being discovered Genie developed exceptional nonverbal communication skills and became capable of utilizing several methods of nonverbal communication to compensate for her lack of language, so the scientists eventually decided to teach her a form of sign language.^[1][3][6]

By the time the scientists finished working with Genie, she had not fully mastered English grammar and her rate of acquisition had significantly slowed down. Linguists ultimately concluded that because Genie had not learned a first language before the critical period had ended, she was unable to fully acquire a language. Furthermore, despite the clear improvements in her conversational competence it remained very low, and the quality of her vocalizations was still highly atypical. While she had expanded her use of language to serve a wider range of functions, she had an unusually difficult time utilizing it during social interactions. Tests on Genie's brain found she was acquiring language in the right hemisphere of her brain, which was highly unusual for a right-handed person, giving rise to many new hypotheses and refining existing hypotheses on cerebral lateralization and its effect on linguistic development.^[3][7][8]

Testing of Genie's language occurred until the end of 1977, but in mid-1975, when she was 18 years old, her mother placed her in an institution which subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse. Due to her treatment in this location she became afraid to speak, and rapidly began losing her newly acquired language skills.^[9][10][11] After removal from this location in April 1977 she moved through several more placements, some of which were highly abusive, causing further regression in her development.^[9][12] In early January 1978, Genie's mother suddenly decided to prevent any further testing and scientific observations of Genie. There has been no direct scientific analysis of Genie since the end of 1977, and the very little available information on her ability to communicate since that time is exclusively from personal observations or secondary accounts of them. Nonetheless, linguists have continued analyzing Genie's language long after this time. Since the case study on Genie ended, there has been some controversy and debate among linguists about how much grammar she had acquired and for how long she had been learning new aspects of language.^[2][13][14]

Background

Genie was born in 1957 without any noted complications at a normal, healthy weight and size, the last, and second surviving, of four children of parents living in Arcadia, California. Around the time of her birth, her father began to isolate himself and his family from other people. At 3 months doctors discovered she had a congenital hip dislocation that caused her to be late to walk, causing her father to decide she was severely mentally retarded and therefore did not like her.^[15][16][17] He tried not to talk to or pay attention to her and discouraged his wife and son, who was around five years older than Genie, from doing so.^[15]

Doctors and scientists who worked with Genie were uncertain about most of her life from birth to 20 months. Her mother said that as a baby Genie was not very cuddly and did not babble very much. During the first year of Genie's life she began to fall behind in her physical development, which researchers believed was a sign that she most likely suffered from both malnutrition and some degree of neglect, although she had no noted mental abnormalities.^[4][18] At times Genie's mother claimed that at an undetermined point Genie began to say some unspecified individual words, but on other occasions said that Genie had never produced speech of any kind, preventing linguists from making any definitive determinations about which was true.^[4][18]

At the age of 14 months Genie came down with a fever and the pediatrician who examined her said that, although her illness prevented him from making a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she could be mentally retarded and have the brain dysfunction kernicterus.^[15][19] Her father took this opinion to mean she was severely retarded. When Genie was 20 months old, after a pickup truck struck and killed her paternal grandmother, Genie's father decided to increase the family's isolation as much as possible. Because he thought Genie was severely retarded he believed she required a higher degree of isolation than the rest of the family, so from that time until Genie reached the age of 13 years, 7 months, he imprisoned Genie in one room of their house.^[15][4]

Genie spent almost all of her childhood locked alone in a bedroom with almost no environmental stimuli, left severely malnourished, and either strapped to a child's toilet or bound inside a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized.^[4][20] Her father refused to speak to or around Genie, and if she made any kind of sound or showed any emotion he would beat her or force her brother to do so. To further discourage her from making any outward expression her father would bare his teeth and bark and growl at her like a wild dog, teaching her not to vocalize or make noise and to give as little outward expression as possible. On occasions when she was either hungry or seeking some kind of attention she made environmental noises, but otherwise maintained silence at all times.^[21]

Genie's father had an extremely low tolerance for any kind of noise, to the point of refusing to have a working television or radio in the house. Apart from one slightly open window Genie did not have any access to auditory stimuli outside the house, and the window was set well away from the street and other houses, so what little she would have been able to hear were almost exclusively non-language environmental sounds.^[21][22] Her father never allowed other people to come to the house, forbade any interaction between Genie and her mother, and forced his son to assist with carrying out his abuse while otherwise preventing him from being in Genie's presence.^[2][23] He did not permit them to speak, and especially not to or around Genie, so any conversations they had were out of Genie's earshot and did not give her the opportunity to hear any meaningful amount of language.^[4][21]

At an unspecified point Genie's father promised his wife that he would allow her to seek treatment for Genie if she lived to the age of 12, but he reneged when she reached 12 and her mother took no action for another year. Sometime during October 1970, Genie's mother left her husband and took Genie with her.^[23][24] A few weeks later, on November 4, Genie's mother inadvertently entered the local social services office, where a social worker observed Genie's behavior and total silence. The social worker and her supervisor brought Genie to the attention of child welfare authorities and the police, and a court order was immediately issued for Genie, who was 13 years and 7 months old, to be admitted to Children's Hospital Los Angeles.^[2][9] The police officer who arrested Genie's parents said that he and other authorities who interacted with Genie had specifically noted that she did not speak at all.^[2][11][25]

Initial assessment

Immediately upon Genie's admission to Children's Hospital Howard Hansen, who was then the head of the hospital's psychiatry division and an early expert on child abuse, and David Rigler, a therapist and USC pediatrics and psychology professor who was the chief psychologist at the hospital, took direct control of her care, and the following day they assigned physician James Kent, another early advocate for child abuse awareness, to be her primary therapist. Children's Hospital staff immediately noted that she did not speak, but at first could not tell whether she had no language or if she was only selectively mute.^[4] Their earliest tests placed her estimated mental age at approximately the level of a 13-month-old, within the range of development when the earliest phases of language acquisition typically begin, leading to some hope that Genie might know some language or still be able to learn it.^[26] Doctors' earliest examinations of Genie uncovered a wide array of physical and mental deficiencies but found none which explained her lack of speech, nor did they find any definitive diagnoses in her few existing medical record.^[4][27][28] 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 on Genie, doctors definitively ruled out brain damage or autism as causes for her lack of speech.^[4][29][30]

During the first examinations of Genie doctors saw that she was clearly picking up some nonverbal information, with Kent emphasizing that from the outset she seemed very intent on looking at peoples' faces and made decent eye contact from other people, and she showed a small amount of responsiveness to it even in the absence of language. Despite this Kent noted that she could only get across a few very basic needs, all through nonverbal communication, and that she neither made facial expressions nor used any discernible body language.^[4][31][32] When Genie was upset she would engage in silent, expressionless, self-harming tantrums until she had physically tired herself out. She never cried during these outbursts—according to several firsthand accounts she could not cry at all—and if she wanted to make noise she would push chairs or other similar objects. As soon as she was finished, she would immediately revert to being completely non-expressive. On a few other occasions she responded to stimuli with a very soft, high-pitched, shrill laugh, but was otherwise completely undemonstrative in her demeanor.^[4][31][32]

Despite audiometry tests confirming she had regular hearing in both ears, she had almost no reaction to speech. Kent's notes on Genie's first two months at Children's Hospital only rarely contained linguistic information, including only one such observation from the entire month of November, which linguists wrote had demonstrated how little Genie responded to language during this time.^[5][33] She seemed to recognize only a very few words, and always reacted as if they were spoken in isolation. Children's Hospital staff initially thought the few responses she did give meant she understood them, but later determined she was reacting to accompanying nonverbal signals.^[33] Even when she was obviously interested in other people talking around her she only reacted if she could pick up other nonverbal information, and without non-linguistic information she could not respond to very basic sentences or commands. She almost never made any attempt to speak, and on these occasions Kent described the sounds she made as, "a kind of throaty whimper."^[4][33]

From tapes of Genie's first two months in the hospital, linguists discerned that by January 1971 Genie's responses to other peoples' speech showed she knew her own name, the words mother and father, the four color words red, blue, green, and brown, the words no and sorry, and a few miscellaneous nouns such as jewelry box, door, and bunny. She also appeared to understand negative commands, and accordingly could discern a warning using a negation, although whether she understood them in the context of sentences was unclear.^{[lower-alpha 1][34][35]} There was speculation, though no conclusive evidence, that she understood the intonation to indicate a question in a yes-or-no context and that she understood imperative mood sentences based on tone of voice, but she otherwise lacked any grammar.^[4][26] Her active vocabulary at that time appeared to consist of just two short phrases, "stop it" and "no more". Some doctors thought she may have spontaneously said a few other words or negative commands, as her very few vocalizations were extremely difficult to understand, but there was no record of them and no one could remember what they might have been. Linguists could not determine the extent of her expressive or receptive vocabulary at any point before then, and therefore did not know whether she had acquired any or all of this language during the preceding two months at the hospital.^[4][26]

Genie's comprehension and production of these few words demonstrated to doctors 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. Nonetheless, based on their observations both Children's Hospital doctors and the linguists who later worked with her concluded that she had not acquired a first language. Because there were no mental or physiological explanations for Genie's inability to learn a language, Kent and Hansen attributed her lack of speech to the extreme isolation of her childhood.^[4][26] Kent came away from his first encounters with Genie extremely pessimistic about her prognosis on all fronts.^[33][28]

Early communication progress

Children's Hospital staff did not keep detailed records of Genie's early linguistic progress, and she only rarely spoke during this time, so there was little data on Genie's language for the first 6 months of her stay.^[36][26] When James Kent met with Genie for the first time he initially observed no visible reactions from her, but upon taking several objects out of a bag he found that she seemed afraid of a small puppet. When she threw it on the floor Kent pretended to be concerned and said, "We have to get him back", and Genie startled him when she repeated the word "back" and nervously laughed.^[4][37] When they subsequently began to play with the puppet she repeated "back" several times, and when Kent said, "The puppet will fall" she repeated the word "fall". Apart from her tantrums, the times she played with this and similar puppets accounted for most of the few instances she made any outward expression during the early part of her stay.^[4]

Within weeks of being admitted to Children's Hospital Genie became much more responsive to nonverbal stimuli, although at first her own demeanor remained devoid of nonverbal signals. During the first months that she lived at the hospital, she gradually began to express more of her emotions outward.^[4][38] Jay Shurley recalled that when he first met Genie, in December 1970, she did not say anything to him but immediately connected with him in a way that he could not explain.^[9] After a fairly short time, Genie's nonverbal communication skills became exceptional. Everyone who worked with her said she had an indescribable way of eliciting emotions, and she seemed able to communicate her desires without talking.^[39][40]

Genie's early receptive and expressive vocabulary acquisition was initially slow, although from the outset people observing her believed her linguistic performance was significantly behind her linguistic competence. In his early sessions, Kent saw that Genie often intently looked at the mouth of a speaker. Within a month she was far more responsive to other people talking, but doctors were unsure whether she was responding more to verbal or nonverbal stimuli.^[4][41] After a month at Children's Hospital Genie started attempting to mimic some speech sounds, although her imitations were very infrequent, and around the same time started to tailor her expressions and responses to the person with whom she was interacting. Soon after hospital staff observed her using the word "stopit", which she treated as one word, as a phrase of ritual play.^[42][43]

Even at this phase, Genie distinguished the names of similar objects even if they were unfamiliar; scientists noted that she quickly drew the distinction between a pen and a marker, and did not mistake one for the other.^[44][45] At the same time she never overgeneralized words for individual objects, such as using the word ball to describe any round object. For something unfamiliar, she always sought the correct word or phrase instead of attempting to apply a word from her existing vocabulary; when she first recognized the difference between a pen and a pencil, she learned the words for each. She could also determine the names of objects based on their uses, as her early distinction between a straight pin and a safety pin evidenced.^[5][8][46]

Psychologists Jack Block and Jeanne Block evaluated Genie in February 1971 and put her language below the two-year-old level on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. Over the course of the next month Genie's vocabulary acquisition began to accelerate at a progressively more rapid pace, and by March 1971 she was learning new words far faster than any of the hospital doctors had anticipated.^[4][47] Observers noted that she seemed to know far more words than she would spontaneously say, but could not be sure about the extent of either her receptive or expressive vocabulary because she was so responsive to nonverbal stimuli.^[5] Her active vocabulary was over 100 words, and doctors saw she clearly understood many words which she did not say herself.^[4][48]

After another month, Genie began spontaneously producing one-word utterances and began to understand increasingly complex sentences.^[4][48][49] Soon after this time she appeared to understand some basic elements of the give-and-take nature of conversation, and without prompting could provide non-imitative one-word responses to statements or questions. When a minor earthquake frightened her in April she rapidly verbalized to some hospital cooks she had befriended, marking the first time anyone had seen her so willing to speak.^[50][51] Around the same time Kent noted the first recorded instance of Genie expressing anger through actions directed at someone else instead of self-harming behavior, although she did not entirely stop attacking herself when upset.^[52]

By May 1971, most of Genie's vocabulary consisted of words for colors, the numbers 1 through 5, the word "mama" and a few peoples' names, the verbs "stop it" and "spit", and a large number of miscellaneous nouns such as "people" and "doctor".^[5][53] She also knew a few compound verbs, such as put back, although linguists concluded that she was almost certainly treating them as single words in her vocabulary, and learned few stative verbs within the typical time frame of language acquisition. To linguists who later evaluated her, the contrast between her vocabulary and that of most young children at this stage of language learning was already becoming apparent. Children's vocabulary primarily consists of nouns and a few particles, but Genie's early lexicon contained almost as many adjectives and verbs as nouns.^[5][54] Unlike most children she used entire phrases as labels, only doing so with single words if someone asked her to do so.^[55] Before she began forming two-word sentences she could both ask for something and associate an object with someone, which was normal, but unlike most children she could also ask about memories or future events which had previously been mentioned.^[8]

One day in May 1971 when Genie was with Jean Butler, her teacher at the hospital, Butler asked a boy holding two balloons how many balloons he had. When the boy said "three", Butler said Genie appeared startled and quickly gave him another balloon. To Butler and the other hospital staff, this demonstrated Genie was listening to other people and that she understood significantly more language than she produced.^[9][56] A few weeks later Genie showed comprehension of simple commands, appropriately responding when Butler said to her, "Scrub them [some pans] with the brush".^[57] Doctors reported that Genie frequently said "No", despite clearly not intending to give a negative response.^[58] During the latter part of her stay at Children's Hospital Genie also used language, as well as other behavior, to get people at the hospital to do things for her, and by the end of her stay she was reportedly very good at getting what she wanted from hospital staff.^[59]

Throughout Genie's stay at Children's Hospital her voice was completely monotonic and extremely high-pitched, far above the normal range of children who are first learning to speak and so high that it did not register on acoustic voice analysis instruments. Her speech was also very soft, with many of her earliest utterances completely silent while others were so quiet that they sounded like whispers.^[4][60][61] Even though she knew how to ask questions, due to her inability to control her voice she had to use facial expressions to indicate a question. Doctors believed that, because Genie had been forced to repress all vocalization during her infancy and childhood, her larynx and vocal tract were extremely underused and the muscles used for speech production were severely atrophied, making it difficult for her to control both air flow and her vocal chords.^[5][62][63] Despite the lack of variability in her own voice, Genie clearly understood different tones of voice in other peoples' speech.^[5]

Throughout 1971 Genie's voice was extremely glottalized, and when she spoke she frequently pronounced only a few sounds; for instance, the word "doctor" sounded more like "dert".^[4][64][65] Like young children, most of Genie's first words were monosyllabic consonant-vowel-(consonant) sequences; the consonants were usually an unaspirated labial or dental stop, and the vowels were monophthongs. But while most peoples' first disyllabic words also follow this pattern, hers had both consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant sequences.^[5] Unusually for someone in a similar phase of first-language acquisition, from the very first disyllabic words Genie more fully articulated Curtiss noted that, except when referring to herself by her (real) name, she immediately demonstrated proper stress patterns in her speech. For around two years the length of time she held out a vowel was initially the only stress indicator she used, and until she incorporated other stress indicators into her speech the length of a stressed vowel was very exaggerated. People unfamiliar with her speech said she sounded either like a deaf child or someone with cerebral palsy, although trained speech pathologists only said the latter.^[66]

Early observations

In December 1970 David Rigler procured a small grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to conduct preliminary studies on Genie, and began planning to carry out more detailed research. In May 1971, Rigler headed a team of doctors and scientists who sought and obtained a three-year grant from the NIMH to carry out a full case study on her.^[9][67] The primary focus of their research was to test the hypothesis of Eric Lenneberg that humans have a critical period for language acquisition, the end of which he defined as the onset of puberty, and the innateness hypothesis of Noam Chomsky, which contended that the ability to learn language is instinctive in humans and is what separates humans from all other animals. UCLA linguistics professor Victoria Fromkin headed linguistic evaluation, and organized a group of linguists to design and carry out their study.^{[lower-alpha 2][68][69]}

In late May, Susan Curtiss began her work on Genie's case as a graduate student in linguistics under Fromkin. Curtiss felt she had started working with Genie somewhat later than ideal in her language acquisition process, the relative lack of information left some ambiguities regarding the exact rate and trajectory of her early vocabulary and grammar acquisition.^[70] During their preliminary observations Curtiss and Fromkin decided that Genie's linguistic abilities were not yet at a usefully testable level, so Curtiss decided to devote the first months of her work to observing Genie's language in everyday situations; for the remainder of Genie's stay at Children's Hospital, Curtiss met with her almost every day. During this time she and Fromkin realized existing linguistic tests would not yield meaningful results, so although they also incorporated a few existing tests, including the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, into their exams, they designed a set of 26 new tests from which they extrapolated most of their data.^[5][53] Curtiss also wrote down every spontaneous utterance she heard Genie make, recording approximately a few thousand by the time she completed her dissertation.^[7][71]

Curtiss quickly recognized Genie's nonverbal communication abilities, recalling several nonverbal interactions Genie had with strangers during that time.^[9][72][73] By this time Genie could name most of the things around her and had an estimated vocabulary of at least a few hundred words, consisting of a few verbs and adjectives and a large number of nouns. She was also extremely eager to expand her vocabulary, frequently grabbing Curtiss' hand and pointing it towards objects for which she wanted to know the word, and if Curtiss could not figure out exactly what Genie was looking for Genie refused to let go until she learned at least one new word.^[9][74][75] Curtiss noted Genie's focus on objective properties was very unusual, as these require a level of cognitive sophistication not present in young children, suggesting that during childhood she had developed mental mechanisms for categorization. Her knowledge of color words, which she showed a particular interest in learning, was of great interest, as previous studies had found 4 year old children with impaired language frequently had not learned these words.^[8][55][76] She had also clearly learned some basic principles of grammar, and understood more than she was producing.^[74]

On one trip in June 1971 Genie heard a description of stuffed animals and imitated the words "big" and "small", and a few minutes later appropriately used the word "big" when describing a ball. On another trip around the same time, when they visited a house someone asked her if she wanted to see a cat responded by saying, "No. No. Cat." and forcefully nodding.^[77] Around this time Genie began to use her first words with two morphemes and constructed her earliest two-word sentences, all of which were modifier-noun or noun-noun attributive constructions such as, "More soup" or, "Genie purse". A short time later, she began to produce noun-predicate adjective sentences such as "Dave sick".^[4][8] During this time she did not use equational sentences, such as, "That's mine", characteristic of young children in this phase of development.^[78] In addition, while most children start forming two-word sentences with a few core words, which they then attach to other words, Curtiss never observed Genie doing this.^[5]

First foster home

In late June 1971 Genie moved into Jean Butler's home, where she stayed until early August. Butler was childless, and at the time lived alone. Soon after moving in with Butler Genie, who had turned 14 while living at the hospital, showed the first signs of reaching puberty, definitively putting her past Lenneberg's proposed critical period.^[79][80] During Genie's stay Butler increasingly limited her contact with the research team, and the only linguistic information from anyone besides Butler during this time was that Genie formed some non-imitative two-word utterances in July, all without verbs and in noun phrase–noun phrase form, and that Genie gave her first imitations of a few unspecified three-word utterances.^[9][81][82] However, Butler filmed Genie and wrote about both her developmental and language progress in her personal journal.^[83]

Butler claimed in her journal that Genie rapidly become far more verbal, and wrote she had taught Genie to say "yes" to other people, to use negative forms of words, and to express her anger through words or by hitting objects. Butler said Genie had argued with her in late July and used negatives in her protestations, which was the first report of Genie using negatives in a sentence and the first time anyone recorded Genie expressing disagreement in language.^[84] In a letter to Jay Shurley, written in, early August Butler told him that Genie regularly used two-word sentences and sometimes produced three-word utterances containing two adjacent adjectives to describe nouns, giving the utterance "one black kitty" as an example of the latter, and claimed that in a recent conversation Genie extensively used negative words and sentences. Butler also reported that a few days prior, when she asked Genie why she had thrown her new pet goldfish outside, Genie explained, "bad orange fish—no eat—bad fish"—which would have been by far her longest utterance to that point.^{[lower-alpha 3][84]}

August 1971–mid-1975

In mid-August 1971, authorities removed Genie from Butler's house and returned her to Children's Hospital. Later the same day they transferred her to David Rigler's home, where she stayed for approximately four years. The Riglers had three adolescent children of their own, one of whom left for college shortly after Genie arrived. For the duration of Genie's stay Rigler's wife, Marilyn, was her teacher; Marilyn had graduate training as a social worker and had just completed a graduate degree in human development, and had previously worked in both nursery schools and Head Start Programs.^[9][13][85] The Riglers gave the rest of the scientific team surrounding Genie far more access to her, and linguists immediately resumed conducting detailed observations.^[4][5][86]

Brain exams

Starting inn January 1971 scientists administered a series of neurolinguistics tests on Genie, making her the first language-deprived child to undergo any detailed brain examinations. Doctors concluded that she was right-handed, and based on their early tests suspected Genie's brain was extremely right-hemisphere dominant.^[5][87] In early March 1971 neuroscientists Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima administered a series of dichotic listening tests and found her non-language results were normal for a right-handed person but that she responded with 100% accuracy for language sounds her left ear while correctly answering at only a chance level for her right ear, a level of discrepancy previously only found in split-brain patients or people who had undergone a left hemispherectomy as an adult.^[5][87][88] Starting in the fall of 1971 scientists at UCLA under the direction of Victoria Fromkin, Susan Curtiss, and Stephen Krashen—who was then also a graduate student in linguistics studying under Fromkin—continued the dichotic listening tests and found that her results remained the same for both non-language and language stimuli in each ear.^[5][87]

The research team also administered a series of tachistoscopic and evoked response tests to measure a variety of her brain functions, and on tests specifically geared towards measuring Genie's language acquisition her results were congruous with adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients. On a one evoked response test Genie had no difficulty giving the correct meaning of sentences using familiar homophones, such as "I sock Bobo" and "The sock is red".^[6][89] This demonstrated that, similar to these patients, her receptive language comprehension was significantly better than her expressive comprehension. In addition, on a tachistoscopic test in 1975 Genie had little difficulty when asked to point to words which rhyme, which was analogous to results from these patients.^[90][91]

When the scientists monitored Genie's responses on their language tests with an EEG, they consistently picked up more activity from the two electrodes placed over her right hemisphere than they did from those over the normal locations of the Broca's area and Wernicke's area in a right-handed person. In particular, they found a high level of involvement from her right anterior cerebral cortex.^[6][92][93] Based on these results the concluded that Genie's brain had completed lateralization and that, because Genie's language center lacked stimulation when she was a child, it had atrophied and her language functions had instead lateralized to her right hemisphere. Her results on their non-language tests suggested to them that her hemispheric dominance was not simply reversed.^[5][6][87] They believed that Genie had been developing as a normal right-handed person until the time her father began isolating her, and attributed the extreme imbalance between Genie's left and right hemispheres to the fact that Genie's sensory stimulation as a child was almost exclusively visual and tactile.^[4][6]

Prior to Genie's case, there had been some observations of right-hemisphere language acquisition in adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients. These studies had consistently shown that both populations were much better at learning vocabulary, although they were able to learn some basic grammar. After determining that Genie was learning language in her right hemisphere, the scientists monitored her linguistic abilities compared to these patients.^[6][94][87] Linguists noted the split brain and left hemispherectomy subjects had an advantage over Genie because, unlike her, their right hemispheres had already acquired at least a small amount of basic language.^[4][5][6]

Before testing

When Genie first moved in with the Riglers she infrequently spoke, still scratched and cut herself when angry, and her speech was much more halting and hesitant than Butler had described. In addition, for reasons they could not discern Genie's responses were almost always several minutes delayed. She did not usually seem to listen to anyone unless she was being directly addressed and typically walked away from somebody who was speaking to her, and while she would stay with someone if specifically asked she rarely seemed attuned to what the person was saying.^[4][95][96] In contrast to Butler's writings the scientists wrote that Genie only rarely used two-word sentences, which prior to October 1971 were all modifier-noun sentences, sentences indicating possession—none containing the possessive 's marker—or the two words of a compound noun such as "number five". For the first few months after moving in with the Riglers linguists did not record any utterances longer than two words, and wrote that she did not use any negative sentences.^[4][95][96]

To counter Genie's self-harming behavior Marilyn first taught Genie to take her frustration out on inanimate objects in their yard, and later during her stay verbally deescalated her. As Genie learned more language she began to gain more control over her responses to situations that upset her, and by the end of her stay with the Riglers she could gesture to indicate her level of anger; depending on whether she was very angry or merely frustrated, she would either vigorously shake one finger or loosely wave her hand.^{[9][97] [98]} In an effort to improve her ability to interact with other people Curtiss began reading some children's stories to Genie, and at first she found that even when Genie was willing to sit with her she did not seem to be engaged with what Curtiss was saying. After several weeks, in mid-October 1971, Curtiss was reading Genie a story when she saw Genie was clearly listening and responding to her speech, and from then on Genie paid attention to people even when they were not speaking directly to or about her.^[99][100] As she settled down with the Riglers she began to talk somewhat more, and her response time also began to improve, but she continued to speak significantly less than most children in similar phases of language learning.^[62][101]

During this time the scientists first observed that, unlike young children, Genie would never use any piece of grammar before complete comprehension.^[102] She also never spoke with the excessive specificity and overly marked words, such as "tooked", characteristic of people in this phase of language acquisition.^[46] Furthermore, whereas children typically begin to use two-word phrases when they have a vocabulary of about 50 words, Genie only began to do so after she could use and understand about 200, matching the timeline observed in children with various types of aphasia.^[4] Curtiss also noted that when Genie learned the word dog she used it to describe any dog but not other animals, indicating she understood how to use generic terms, and that upon learning the name of the Riglers' dog she also recognized that the name was specific to him.^[5] In a review of Curtiss' dissertation, language psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow suggested the lack of overgeneralization may have been due to differences between the mind of a young child versus an adolescent as opposed to the properties of early language acquisition.^[103]

Although Genie initially did not use any negative forms she soon began to show comprehension of them, albeit much more accurately and consistently with expressions using the word not (regardless of whether the speaker used the word not in its full form or as part of a contraction containing n't) than the prefix un.^[5] Instead of learning negatives through the three-step process which linguists believed young children did, she appeared to have gained comprehension of every kind of negation at once. When tested on negative sentences between November 1971 and June 1973, Genie responded with 100% accuracy.^[104] The ability to tell affirmative and negative sentences apart had previously been observed in split-brain and adult left-hemispherectomy patients.^[6] In September and October 1971 she began incorporating verbs into her two-word utterances, such as, "Dave hurt", although at first she never included the first person subject and inconsistently included any subject.^[4][5] During this time Curtiss also noted that Genie never confused gender in her speech, although she never used pronouns to mark gender and only marked it through gender-specific nouns.^[105]

Although Genie's two-word sentences contained many of the same syntactical properties as those of young children, she was much better at labeling and describing emotions and concrete objects, especially colors, sizes, and qualities. Two of her early adjectives were "funny" and "silly", and most of her earliest two-word sentences modified nouns, such as "yellow balloon" and "lot bread". Taken with her distinction between general and subordinate terms, this strongly indicated a focus on physical characteristics to a degree not normally found in children, who are typically better at describing relationships.^{[103][106][107]} Genie also had significantly more action verbs than normal in her early vocabulary.^{[108][8][105]}

During testing

Linguists began active testing of Genie's language in October 1971, when Curtiss and Fromkin decided her linguistic abilities had advanced to the point where they would yield usable results. Curtiss conducted the tests herself once a week almost every week, and conducted the primary analysis of the results. Their tests measured both Genie's vocabulary and her acquisition of various aspects of grammar, including syntax, phonology, and morphology.^[4][5][109] Their earliest tests were deliberately short, only looking for six to eight responses per test, and over the course of testing Curtiss and Fromkin gradually increased their duration.^[5][110]

When Curtiss first started testing Genie she found that although Genie usually did not actively resist she never initiated tests and seemed only to do the absolute least amount required, which Curtiss later attributed to Genie simply being lazy, making the first year of testing extremely difficult.^[111] As Curtiss continued Genie grew to largely enjoy being tested and became much more willing to participate, though she sometimes playfully gave deliberately wrong answers, and on some occasions would even indicate that she wanted to take the tests. Even later during her testing Curtiss sometimes struggled to get Genie to cooperate and wrote that Genie continued to do less than she was capable of, but noted that Genie usually put in more effort and that she could typically anticipate Genie's level of engagement on a given day.^{[5][112][113]}

1971–1973: Early testing

Selected utterances^[7]

Utterance	Date	Notes	Curtiss' gloss (if any)
Dave hurt.	October 1971	Subject-verb	N/A
Stocking white.	November 1971	Noun-predicate	N/A
Mark mouth hurt.	November 1971	Three-word sentence	N/A
Play kitchen.	February 1972	Locative sentence	Play in kitchen.
Cow tongue meat.	July 1972	Complex noun phrase	A cow's tongue is meat.
Want go shopping.	July 1972	Expanded verb phrase	N/A
No more father.	July 1972	Stage One negative sentence	N/A
Want go walk Ralph.	October 1972	Complex noun phrase, more complex verb phrase	I want to walk to Ralph's.
Get out baby buggy!	Early 1973	Vocative case	N/A
Judy my finger caught door.	February 1973	Complex sentence	Judy caught her finger in the door.

Upon commencing her tests Curtiss found that although Genie's comprehension was clearly ahead of her production, it was only slightly ahead.^[4][114] By this time Genie had begun to diversify her two-word utterances to include sentences in either subject-verb or verb-object order, which they suggested meant Genie was grasping the subject–verb–object sentence structure typically used in English. She could follow other common word order rules as well, as evidenced in her verb-complement sentences.^[5][103][81] At the very beginning of Curtiss' testing, word order was the only non-vocabulary aspect of language Genie could utilize in her utterances.^[115]

Tests administered in October 1971 showed that while Genie did not use the plural forms of words and could not distinguish between plural and singular words or inflections, she clearly knew the difference between one versus more than one object and understood numbers and quantitative descriptors such as "many" or "lots of".^[5][81] Soon after testing began Genie also started using some regular past tense forms of weak verbs, correctly using the bound morpheme and suffix -ed. On tests Curtiss noted that Genie consistently recognized and correctly responded to the conjugations of irregular past tense verbs, such as to go, and strong verbs, such as to give or to break at a considerably higher rate than she did regular weak verbs. Despite this comprehension she only started to use these, either in imitation or in spontaneous speech, in 1973, and her spontaneous production of them remained limited.^{[5][116][117]}

In 1972 Fromkin said that by November 1971 Genie's speech was, "strictly rule-governed", and that her grammar at that time was similar to a typical 18- to 20-month-old.^[118] In November 1971 Genie began forming noun-predicate two-word utterances, such as "stocking white". Genie had also begun using the genitive case in some of her two-word sentences around this time, with many of these sentences, such as "Marilyn bike", indicating possession; for all of these early possessive sentences, she entirely relied on word order.^[4][5] During the same time the scientists also started testing Genie's knowledge of sentences containing modifiers for properties such as size, shape, and color, and for the first two months Genie only gave a correct response 62% of the time.^[4][5]

November 1971 was also the time that Genie produced her very first spontaneous three- to four-word utterances, although they were extremely uncommon at this point. These utterances were all either modifier–noun sentences such as "little white clear box", subject–verb–object sentences in noun–verb–noun form such as "Tori chew glove", or verb–noun phrase sentences, further convincing the scientists that Genie understood English word order.^[4] Some, such as "Small two cup", clearly demonstrated that she was not simply imitating other people.^[119] Although the scientists saw this as significant progress they noted that, whereas most children take around four to six weeks to progress beyond the two-word sentence stage, it took Genie five months.^{[5][120][121]} Some of Genie's utterances from this time until the end of 1973, such as "Elevator hurt silly goose", were so unintelligible that Curtiss termed them "nonsentences", although she believed Genie was trying to communicate something. A few of these, such as "Angry burn stove", were a type of subject–subject–subject sentence previously observed in children with various types of language disorders.^[122]

Even after beginning to use three and four word sentences, for months Genie primarily spoke in two-word utterances. In these early longer sentences, she began explicitly using pieces of grammar which the scientists thought she knew but had been unable to confirm. She started including the first-person subject, expanding sentences such as "Love Curtiss" to "Genie love Curtiss", and could incorporate what would have previously been a modifier-noun or possessive utterance into a longer sentence, changing the sentence, "More soup" to, "Want more soup".^{[lower-alpha 4][4][123]} These sentences convinced linguists beyond all doubt that Genie understood subject–verb–object word order. Before December 1971 Genie could only use one noun at a time in a sentence, saying, "Cat hurt" and then, "Dog hurt" as two separate sentences, but beginning in early 1972 Genie could form and use increasingly complex noun phrases in ways that were clearly not imitative.^[4][5]

On tests between November 1971 and May 1972 Curtiss determined that Genie viewed non-specific adjectives describing size, such as little as absolute rather than relative values without superlative or comparative markers. Between January and May 1972 her comprehension of noun-modifier sentences significantly increased and starting in May 1972, after Curtiss replaced the word little with tiny, Genie showed clear comprehension.^[5][124] On tests of her comparatives from January 1972 into 1973 and found she answered with 100% accuracy to both the word more and the suffix -er, but noted that she never used them in her own speech. Prior to 1972 Genie responded to the conjunctions and and or as if they both meant and, but even after recognizing there was a difference never fully grasped the meaning of or. On tests, Genie showed perfect comprehension of and while giving correct answers to tests with or fewer than 10% of the time.^[5][125] Despite her difficulty on tests, Curtiss noted that Genie always understood disjunction marked by the word or in everyday conversation. Genie never attempted to use any other conjunctions such as but or if, and with one possible highly ungrammatical exception never tried to connect two sentences.^[8][126]

In early 1972, Genie began combining verbs to form two-word verbs in her sentences; most of these were two-word utterances requesting an action, such as "Leave on", but on at least one occasion in early November 1973 she included a two-word verb in part of a longer sentence, "Take out coal mine [the Riglers' name for a closet in their house] school bag".^{[lower-alpha 5][127]} She also began using two consecutive verbs in some of her three and four word utterances.^[128][127] Genie could also use two words, such as "piece wood", in different contexts, but a later analysis speculated that she treated all of these as single words in her vocabulary as opposed to combining the two separate words to form a noun phrase.^[129] Genie's first locative sentences also appeared around this time, although they were only two or three words, always in either noun-noun or verb-noun form with one of the nouns being a locative noun, and contained no prepositions. At the time this started to occur, the scientists observed the first construction of verb phrases in Genie's speech.^[5][130]

Throughout January and February 1972 Genie began more consistently speaking in two-word subject–verb and verb–object utterances, confirming that she had mastered English word order.^[81] During this time she began gaining use of some prepositions, spontaneously using the words in and on, which were the first words in her speech that exclusively served a grammatical purpose.^[5][115] She did not always include them in her utterances, and all of her early uses occurred when she was answering a question.^[131] Although Genie produced possessive sentences by the start of 1972, on tests during January and February of that year which included sentences such as, "Point to the cat's foot" and, "Point to the foot of the cat" yielded only 50% correct answers. After March of that year she demonstrated full comprehension of both on tests, despite not using either of these constructions in her speech, and after two more months, in May 1972, she began to use the verb have in possessive sentences, i.e., "Miss Fromkin have blue car." In February 1972 she began to use negative sentences, all consisting of "No more" preceding either a noun or a noun and a verb such as "No more take wax", which inguists wrote was her simply adding "No more" to the beginning of what could have been an utterance by itself.^[4][5][117]

In the spring of 1972 Genie began to spontaneously use the definite article the, marking the first determiners in her speech, but for several months almost exclusively used it in imitation.^[5][132] In April and May 1972, by which time she was steadily increasing the complexity of her verb phrases, Genie began these with similarly expanded noun phrases. During the month of June she began to use "No more" with only a verb, such as "No more have", to form negative sentences, always adding it to the beginning of what could have been a separate utterance.^[5][130] In July of that year the scientists noted Genie's first verb-verb phrase sentences, such as "Like chew meat", and she then quickly began using complex verbs with complex noun phrases, as in the utterance, "Want buy toy refrigerator".^[4]

Another early test Curtiss administered was on regular plural forms, and by July 1972 Genie still did not use them in her speech and on tests gave correct answers at only a chance level. At that point Curtiss said she decided to assist Genie by creating a test designed for her to learn plurals, marking the first time she actively attempted to teach Genie any grammar, and by August 1972 Genie mastered regular plurals. This contrasted with earlier observations of people acquiring language in their right hemispheres, who normally never learn any single/plural distinction.^[6] No one observed her incorrectly using this phoneme, but while she used it in imitation only did so in five (all undated) spontaneous utterances even after full comprehension and practice with pronouncing it; three of these were marked with /z/ and two with /s/, although Genie changed the /z/ sound in one of the words to a /d/.^[5][133] In addition, she never used any irregular plurals such as children or teeth.^[120]

After another few months, in November 1972, Genie could correctly use the word on—although at that point it was not completely clear if she distinguished between on and in—and could correctly use the suffix -ing to describe events in the present progressive. These were the first grammatical markers observed in her speech, and both are normally two of the first grammatical markers young children are able to use. Curtiss wrote that all of Genie's earliest utterances containing in and on were answers to somebody asking her a question, and also noted that she never incorrectly used -ing.^{[5][115][131]} Her use of the suffix -ing on exclusively dynamic verbs also indicated to linguists that Genie was categorizing verbs as either dynamic or stative. However, she did not use this with the verb to be until the fall of 1973, and then only when speaking in the first and third-person. Even after learning the present progressive, she inconsistently gave correct responses to these sentences on tests. Furthermore, whereas most children learn to modify a sentence by adding, subtracting, or inflecting the words within it, use of the suffix -ing proved to be the only way in which Genie could modify a sentence without changing any of the base words.^[134][135]

Throughout the time the scientists tested Genie they tried to teach her to count in sequential order, which proved very difficult for her. Soon after her admission to Children's Hospital she demonstrated some understanding of the concept of numbers and number words, and had learned to be able to recognize the number of objects in a group up to the number 7 through her gestalt perception. Despite this, she did not start to count until late 1972. When she began to, her efforts were very deliberate and laborious and her progress was extremely slow. The scientists noted that she performed significantly below average on non-language sequential order tests, which are predominantly controlled in the left hemisphere of the brain, and suggested that her inability to count was a manifestation of her difficulty with these tasks.^[136][137]

In December 1972, after Curtiss and Genie had accidentally been locked out of the Riglers' home, Curtiss said to Genie, "Tell them [David and Marilyn Rigler] what happened" and Genie pointed to the door and said, "Tell door lock". This indicated she had some degree of recursion in her grammar, which they considered an especially important development and the scientists interpreted another utterance from 1973, "Ask David see swing", as both further confirmation she had grasped recursion and the first complex sentence she produced.^{[5][103][138]} By this time she understood and could freely use intensifiers such as the word very, and had already showed full comprehension of comparatives, but only tenuously grasped superlatives. She never used them in her own speech but appeared to understand them, and while she was generally better with the suffix -est than with the word most Curitss thought Genie might not have known the actual meaning of -est. The contrast between her understanding and lack of production of superlatives furthered the researchers' belief that, even in the absence of language, her cognitive structure had developed in some form.^[5][139]

In early 1973 Genie started using definite articles in imitative utterances, such as "In the backyard".^[138] By this time she had also gained the ability to spontaneously use the prepositions next to, beside, behind, in, at, front, and after.^[5][115] However, until 1975 she exclusively used at in the phrase at school, leading Curtiss to believe at school was one word in her vocabulary, and Genie inconsistently understood other prepositions such as behind, over, and in front of. Curtiss wrote that on tests Genie frequently mistook both behind and in back of for in front of, though by 1977 her understanding of behind on tests had substantially improved.^[5][140][91] By contrast, on non-test settings Genie's responses to in front of, behind, in back of, and under generally indicated comprehension; unlike most children, who learn under a long time before the other three, she had somewhat more difficulty with under.^[141]

In March 1973 Genie seemed unable to grasp on or under when evaluated on one of Curtiss' tests, even though she had correctly used on in non-test settings. The scientists suggested this disparity was likely due at least partially to logistical difficulties with the test, as she had to simultaneously speak and move objects into different positions, which they did not require her to do on subsequent preposition tests.^[5] When given a different test Genie at first gave correct responses to on 48% of the time, and her confusion was mostly with the words in or under; by September 1973 she showed full comprehension of both in and on, and Curtiss thought her earlier problems with on could have had more to do with the test's structure.^{[lower-alpha 6][142]} Soon afterward she began consistently including a in noun phrases, and eventually she could use both articles and the words and and more in noun phrases.^[7][143] In the early spring of that year she began to use the determiner another and started including prepositions and determiners in adverbial phrases, such as, "In hospital, shot hurt arm", although she still frequently deleted them.^[138][142] Genie's acquisition of locative adverbs came before she learned ones for either time, such as tomorrow, or manner, such as otherwise, which was normal, but although she started to use time adverbs a few months later she never used any manner adverbs.^[144]

By April 1973 Genie began regularly using verb particles in her spontaneous utterances, frequently using phrases such as "put back" and "take off" in her speech, and began using imperative sentences using the vocative, as in "Go way Joel, finish story!"^{[145][5][138][146]} Researchers noted she began using imperatives much later in the language acquisition process than most and that they remained very infrequent, and considered either her emotional difficulties or her lack of self-concept possible explanations. By mid-1973 Genie had begun to include indirect objects in her sentences, as shown in utterances such as "Curtiss give me valentine", but although she could use both definite and indefinite articles she never distinguished between the two.^{[5][138][147]} In addition, whereas most people learn to use demonstratives, such as this or those, and numbers at the same time, she never used these in her early spontaneous noun phrases, and in 1977 Curtiss noted that Genie had still never used any demonstratives. In the fall of 1973 Genie began correctly using the verb has as the third person singular form of the verb to have, but continued not to conjugate it in most situations and never used any other third person singular forms, suggesting she may have learned it as a separate word and not as a conjugation of the verb to have.^[7][147]

In October 1973, in addition to forming negative sentences with the phrase No more Genie began to use the word "No" by itself. For both, she still simply appended the negation it to the beginning of an otherwise unaltered utterance, which was the normal first step for children learning negation.^{[5][115][121]} About a week later she started using the word not in the same manner in sentences and showed clear understanding of more complex forms of negation, although Curtiss noted that they never tested her on a complex sentence containing a negation in both clauses.^{[5][148][149]} But while children usually quickly progress to saying "I not have toy" and then "I do not have toy", and then learn to use contractions, Genie did not move past the "Not have toy" stage for more than a year.^[5][6][150] Until 1975 she could only use negations at the beginning of a sentence, such as, "Not good fish tank".^[4][7] In addition, despite clearly understanding the prefix un- as a negative form by this time Genie never used it in her speech.^[151][152]

Early pronoun comprehension

Starting in September 1972 Curtiss spent a great deal of time testing Genie's acquisition of pronouns and found Genie strenuously resisted, often refusing to respond all or clearly guessing.^[5][153] By December 1972 Genie understood and could spontaneously use the pronoun I, even pronouncing it with more stress for emphasis, but almost exclusively used it with either the word want or like and frequently used her own name. She did not show any comprehension of any other pronouns besides you and me, which she interchangeably used; Curtiss said Genie would often say, "Mama love you" while pointing to herself, attributing this to a manifestation of Genie's inability to distinguish who she was from who someone else was.^{[4][154][155]} Genie did not spontaneously use any other pronouns or use pronominal forms in her speech, although by 1973 she clearly understood the reciprocal pronoun each other.^[5][8][153]

In 1973 and early 1974, when Genie became more receptive to the pronoun tests, on one such test Genie's responses were correct less than 50% of the time when identifying possessive pronouns such as his, your, and my.^[5] By 1973 she began to use the possessive pronoun my, as in the sentence, "Willie slap my face", making my and the possessive pronoun her the only possessive pronouns she learned. It was clear to Curtiss that this comprehension was not total, and was at least partially predicated on the method of testing.^{[lower-alpha 7][156][115]} On another test from this time on reflexive pronouns, such as "The boy is feeding himself" or, "He is feeding himself", she got more wrong than right, but did somewhat better on sentences using object pronouns such as "He is feeding him" and "He is feeding her."^[5][60] Curtiss also recorded Genie using the word it twice, but only in sentences that were, for all practical purposes, imitative utterances.^[157]

Interrogative questions

Prior to January 1972, if asked a question using the interrogative word where, Genie invariably responded by saying the last word of the speaker's sentence. In early January 1972 she began to give accurate, grammatical responses to these questions in conversations.^[131] By February 1972, in everyday interactions Genie clearly understood and appropriately acted on most questions using the interrogative words who, what, where, when, why, which, and how.^[158][159] Unlike most children, who grasp who, what, which, and where questions much earlier than when, how, or why questions, the only one of these which took longer for Genie understand was why and even this took much less time than linguists expected. Because the latter group of questions require more cognitive sophistication to properly answer, the scientists offered this as proof that Genie had a higher level of cognitive functioning than most children in similar phases of language acquisition.^[5][131]

Despite appropriate responses to these questions in non-test settings, on most simple questions such as "Who is the girl pulling?" or "What is the red box on?" Genie did not react or reply to test questions at all. When she did respond it was clear that she could not make any sense of the sentence, either stating the answer in the question itself, attempting to fuse two separate questions into one, or simply attempting to transform a declarative sentence into a question.^[160] In all cases, the resulting sentences were obviously ungrammatical and completely nonsensical; two of her typical efforts were, "What red blue is in?" and, "Where is tomorrow, Mrs. L?"^[9][160] Curtiss could not discern any method to Genie's verbal responses, and after seeing how much trouble it gave Genie decided to stop administering this test.^[5]

Genie also remained entirely unable to ask an interrogative question or use any grammatical markers to indicate questions in conversations, only ever attempting to if someone specifically requested that she do so.^{[lower-alpha 8][5][160][161]} In an effort to work around this, in mid-1973 Curtiss unsuccessfully attempted to help Genie memorize a few interrogative questions for use in everyday situations; on one occasion in late May 1974, when Curtiss asked Genie to repeat, "Where are the graham crackers?", Genie said, "I where is graham cracker" or, "I where is graham cracker on top shelf."^[162] This inability was extremely unusual for a first-language learner, as children typically learn to use questions as they begin understanding them and typically ask interrogative questions in their earliest two-word sentences, and starkly contrasted with her ability to learn other ritualized speech. After approximately a year people stopped asking her to produce interrogative questions, after which her ungrammatical efforts to form them completely ceased.^[163][158]

Curtiss theorized Genie's difficulty with forming interrogative questions was likely due to two main factors. Genie had no deixis of any kind—person, place, or time—in her grammar, which in and of itself would have made it impossible for her to use any interrogative questions. She also had no linguistic movement in her speech, which interrogatives require. In 1975, the scientists speculated emotional difficulties may have made her unwilling to attempt forming them in spontaneous speech.^{[158][162][164]} Curtiss attributed Genie's inability to memorize a grammatically correct interrogative question to being generally unable to remember sentences using grammatical elements she had not mastered, which is typical of young children.^[165]

1974–mid-1975: Later testing

Selected utterances^[7]

Utterance	Date	Notes	Curtiss' gloss (if any)
Another dog have house.	Early 1974	Spontaneous use of a determiner	The other dog has a house.
Talk Mama to buy mixmaster.	May 4, 1974	Complex complement structure	I'll tell Mama to buy me a mixmaster.
I am thinking about Miss J. at school in hospital.	May 6, 1974	Two prepositional phrases in one sentence	N/A
Want Curtiss play piano.	August 7, 1974	Sentence indicating desire	N/A
I want think about Mama riding bus.	November 20, 1974	Increased complexity of complement structure	N/A
Teacher said Genie have temper tantrum outside.	May 2, 1975	Serial verb construction	N/A
I do not have a toy green basket.	July 25, 1975	Do-support	N/A

From October 1973 to January 1974, Curtiss tested Genie on simple past tense sentences such as, "The girl opened the umbrella" and found that Genie was only correct 50% of the time. However, Genie was far better with past tense completive sentences marked with the verb finish, such as "The girl finished opening the umbrella". from February 1974 to June 1975, she only gave one incorrect response to a sentence phrased this way.^[4][5] Curtiss deliberately added this element into her past tense test after Genie had begun learning sign language, as linguists already knew that children learning American Sign Language learned to comprehend and use the completive past tense aspect much more quickly than children learning spoken English. By mid-1975 it remained unclear whether she had any use of irregular past tense verbs, such as to go, as all of her utterances containing them were either imitations or responses to questions which had used them.^[166]

Curtiss also used this test to gauge Genie's knowledge of future tense sentences, and found that Genie was almost perfect at identifying them if they were phrased with the going-to future construction, such as, "The girl is going to open the umbrella". However, she showed no comprehension when Curtiss asked her to identify a sentence with an identical semantic meaning but using the auxiliary verb will. This was in stark contrast to most children, who almost always correctly respond to both. 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.^[5][128]

By early 1974 the scientists estimated that Genie's grammar was congruous with that of a typical two or two and a half year old, although her acquisition continued to be far slower than normal children. In the early part of that year Curtiss began testing Genie's ability to distinguish between the active and passive voice. They found that, unlike most children but similar to adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients, she was completely unable to draw the distinction and gave random responses to sentences such as, "The boy is pulling the girl" and, "The girl is being pulled by the boy". In her speech, she never gained any use of the passive voice.^[4][6][103] In these sentences Genie would often, though not always, confuse the subject and object, which was a major contrast with both her ability to process subject–verb–object sentences in other contexts and her own subject–verb–object sentences. However, these reversals were only with certain pronouns, and by January 1974 she had begun to show marked improvement.^[167]

At the end of 1973 and into early 1974 Genie's locative sentences underwent considerable expansion, as she produced utterances such as, "Like good Harry at hospital".^[4] In a few sentences from this time she began to incorporate the words of other people into her own utterances, as in "Dentist say drink water"; direct quotations would remain the only situation in which she could engage in any embedding of elements of language, and these remained very rare.^{[lower-alpha 9][168]} On one occasion in early February 1974, Genie showed the ability to use the iterative aspect via reduplication in the utterance "Tomorrow big, big prize hula hoop". Curtiss noted that this kind of reduplication is much more commonly expressed through the word very, which she wrote made Genie's use of it noticeably abnormal.^[169]

In the late spring of 1974 Genie began to use the phrase no more to represent its common lexical meaning, as demonstrated in the utterances "Have no more", "Not have more"—which Curtiss interpreted as two variations of the same intended sentence—and "No more penny".^[170] During May 1974 Curtiss recorded the first instances of Genie using compound noun phrases, which were the only times Genie would use the one conjunction she knew, and. At the same time Curtiss noted Genie's first compound sentences, such as, "Mama not have baby. Baby grow up.", but with one possible exception, the utterance "I want save money buy two rectangle box" dated early October 1974, she did not use any compound verb phrases.^{[lower-alpha 10][5][7][171][138]} In that same month Genie correctly used a few verb infinitives in her speech, including to buy, but Curtiss wrote that in all cases Genie clearly treated them as one word and never observed Genie appending the to to the beginning of a verb to form an infinitive. Later that month Genie showed that she understood the comparative fewer in everyday conversations, although she still did not understand the words many, most, few, or fewest.^[170] During this time Genie also began adding the possessive pronoun my to her possessive sentences, and correctly used the marker 's to indicate possession.^{[5][171][138]}

In both test settings and conversations Genie still had some difficulty with reversing I and you, my and your, and me and you, but during the summer of 1974 she began to show definite improvement in both her comprehension and production of first and second person pronouns. At the same time, she started to demonstrate the ability to modify first subject and then object pronouns. In August 1974, Curtiss recalled asking Genie, "You were driving a tractor?" and Genie responding, "I driving tractor", and in the same month, when Curtiss asked "Do you want me to tell you?", Genie said, "Tell me." By mid-1975, although she continued to confuse both me versus you and my versus your on occasion, it occurred with much less frequency.^[7][172] Curtiss also noted Genie starting to use the benefactive case in the summer of 1974, although she did not always include the word for.^[7][173]

Genie also understood self, as well as its plural, selves, as a reflexive pronoun marker. In most scenarios she understood reflexive pronouns, except when she encountered a noun phrase with a pronoun she misunderstood; for instance, if given the sentence, "He is feeding himself", she frequently confused he with she and therefore changed himself to herself. By contrast, she was still unable to fully understand object pronouns.^{[lower-alpha 11][174]} In sentences with reciprocals or the reflexive pronoun themselves Genie appeared to understand the pronoun they, but never used it in her own speech. Curtiss thought Genie was likely guessing the meaning from context, as Genie could discern plurality from the elements of the sentences using it. Her pronoun acquisition was described at that time as "painfully slow", and she still did not use any pronouns besides I in her speech, but researchers insisted there was definite progress. There were certain pronouns, such as the word there as a pronoun, that Genie never used or understood.^[175][176]

In the fall of 1974 Genie used a few sentences with internal negatives, using the words no, no more, and not. Although all but two of these sentences were ones she had specifically practiced, and one of the spontaneous occurrences was partially an imitation, Curtiss saw this as a significant step. These sentences grew progressively more common and by the beginning of 1975 she had completely mastered internal negatives, as shown in utterances such as "Ellen not work at school". Curtiss did not view this as true linguistic movement, and thought that Genie's grammar had simply changed in such a way that she placed negations in the middle of a sentence.^[7][177]

By the fall of 1974 Genie had begun to differentiate between third-person pronouns such as he and she, but still had a high rate of error. In her speech she still would not use third person pronouns, and continued to lack either relative pronouns or indefinite pronouns.^{[5][178][179]} In late 1974, she used locatives after an object phrase for the first time; since she had already been using locatives to modify subject noun phrases for a long time, the lateness with which she did this surprised the scientists.^[7][180] At around the same time Genie had begun to use more than one prepositional phrase in some of her sentences, and during the spring of 1975 Curtiss tested Genie on the preposition between and found Genie showed full comprehension in all instances.^[7][177]

In 1975 Genie began to use a different type of serial verb construction, in sentences such as "I like go ride Miss F. car". Curtiss noted that all of these were first-person utterances, that she almost never said the word I, and that she frequently used standalone verbs, such as go, which typically precede a second verb; although in several cases she used the verbs go ride and go walk, Curtiss thought Genie may have treated these as single words. Therefore, she wrote that although these utterances were progress they were not as complicated as they initially appeared. In addition, all of these sentences were in verb–(verb–verb phrase) form which Curtiss argued had no hierarchical structure.^[7][180]

Through 1974 and 1975, Curtiss tested Genie on other types of complex sentences as well. She wrote that she would repeat the sentence if Genie initially did not understand it, the only test for which Curtiss did this. In non-test settings during early 1975 Genie gave some indications that she grasped conditional sentences, and at least once gave a verbal response to David Rigler which may have demonstrated clear understanding. This would have been a huge gain, as conditional sentences require a high level of cognitive sophistication, although Curtiss said she could not be completely sure of whether Genie truly comprehended them. Curtiss also noted that, despite the fact that Genie clearly understood contractions, no one ever observed her using any in her speech.^[6][181]

By at least 1975 Genie clearly understood and incorporated the concept of temporality into her speech, and unusually for people acquiring a first language she understood the words before and after before learning past or future tense markers. She could also use sentences to indicate causation, albeit without saying the words if–then, such as the utterance, "Neal not come, happy. Neal come, sad."^[8][182] Despite mastering temporality, by 1975 Genie remained largely unable to respond to sentences where the nouns were not in the same sequence as the events, such as "Touch your ear after you touch your nose". The scientists noted that on these types of sentences she improved more with sentences asking her to do something after instead of doing something before, which they wrote did not fit with a hypothesis, proposed in 1971, that had predicted children would learn the word before first.^[183] In a 1981 paper Curtiss interpreted Genie's temporal utterances as an expansion of Genie's vocabulary, but an outside analysis of Curtiss' writings, however, concluded that Genie had to have acquired some degree of grammar to have formed these sentences.^[7][8]

When asked to distinguish between all, some, and one, at first Genie would interpret some to mean all. By 1975, she had reversed this and began mistaking some for one instead, which Curtiss interpreted as a sign of progress.^{[lower-alpha 12][128]} This contrasted with her distinction between more and less, which she had demonstrated by at least August 1973.^[5] In everyday conversations, she also demonstrated understanding of the qualifiers one and all. When learning relative terms such as large and small or narrow and wide Genie simultaneously learned both words in the pair, whereas most people acquire either the marked or the negative form first, and never mistakenly used one term in a pair to mean the other. Although she had difficulty with them on tests, she showed significantly greater comprehension of different pairs of relative and relational terms outside of test settings.^[6][185]

In early 1975, Genie began to use a type of ungrammatical sentence with a subject–verb–(object or subject)–verb–({subject or object}–verb) construction; two such sentences were "I want mat is present" and "Father hit Genie cry long time ago". Curtiss wrote that some of these could have been typical, grammatically correct sentences if Genie had included relative pronouns—for instance, the first sentence would be grammatical if she had said "I want the mat that is present"—but others such as the second looked to Curtiss like two separate sentences which Genie had combined, and in the process of doing so removed some of the nouns. At around the same time Genie also began to produce ungrammatical sentences containing a copula, first with utterances such as "Is Akron" and later to including verbs without the -ing suffix such as "Boy is pinch". Approximately one half of these types of ungrammatical sentences were Genie's responses to people who told her to, "speak in sentences", which she would interpret as being asked to include a form of to be in a sentence; unlike her attempts to form interrogative questions she produced some grammatical sentences with copulas, such as "Glass is clear". As with interrogative questions, when not pressed to produce sentences containing these structures the errors she made with them immediately became far less frequent.^[7][186]

Despite mastering word order, Genie still had difficulty with distinguishing between simple actor–action–object sentences. In 1975, when given the sentences "The girl pulls the boy" or "The boy pulls the girl" and asked to point to the corresponding picture, her answers would either be all correct or all incorrect. While this was progress from 1971 and 1972, when she simply guessed, this indicated that she was attempting to use a word order strategy but could not ascertain a specific formula. Her difficulty with this also manifested itself in her inability to use word order to tell the difference between sentences such as, "What is on the blue box?" and, "What is the blue box on?". In addition to the disparity with the results on pronoun and relative clause tests, which indicated Genie was using word order strategies, researchers wrote this was a major contrast with the clearly defined word order rules observed in her spontaneous speech.^{[5][187][136]}

By early 1975 Genie showed comprehension of simple and complex sentences where the object was the relative clause, such as "The boy is looking at the girl who is frowning", or sentences where the subject was the relative clause and did not end in a noun phrase, such as "The boy who is frowning is looking at the girl".^[148][149] However, when interpreting a complex sentence in which a relative clause ending in a noun phrase came before the main verb, such as "The boy who is looking at the girl is frowning", she interpreted the noun closest to the verb as the subject. The scientists wrote that this meant that she was using a word order strategy to determine the meaning of these sentences, which they considered progress because her earlier responses to them were clearly guesses.^{[lower-alpha 13][5][188]} By this time Genie could only consistently count as high as 7 in sequential order, and her ability to do this came at the expense of her ability to do so via gestalt perception.^{[lower-alpha 14][5][187][136]}

By 1975 Genie demonstrated full comprehension of several paired words, such as long and short or high and low. Most of the time she learned both words in a pair at the same time, and in a few cases, she learned either the negative or the marked word in the pair first; for instance, she learned the word narrow before wide and few before many. For some paired words, such as left and right, her answers on tests were still less than 100% even by 1977, but she consistently showed the same level of understanding for each word. However, Genie never made any distinction between the words here and there; on multiple tests, when told to come or go to a person or area her response to either, "Come here" and, "Go there" was to go to either the closest or the farthest person or area irrespective of who had spoken.^[5][189]

When Genie left the Riglers' house in mid-1975, at the age of 18, she had acquired a degree of vocabulary and grammar far greater than that observed in non-human subjects. In June of that year, David Rigler wrote that she continued to make significant strides in every field which the scientists were testing.^[7][103] Despite the marked improvement in Genie's language, it was still clearly abnormal. 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. and how much of what she did use was attributable to acquisition versus rote memory was not readily obvious.^{[4][114][190]}

Auxiliary structure

Despite Genie's grammar acquisition, her speech had remained entirely devoid of pro-forms, modal verbs, modal particles, or auxiliary verbs such as have or will.^[5][191] In the spring of 1974 Curtiss thought Genie may have acquired use of the contractible auxiliary you, but noted that she only used it in sentences that were mostly imitations.^[7] Although she memorized a few ritual phrases containing auxiliary structures, because she could only use them in very specific ways linguists did not consider this grammar acquisition. In January 1974 the scientists noticed the first instances of her using copulas in her spontaneous sentences, which they considered a significant gain, but Curtiss noted that Genie never used a contractible copula such as "That's mine".^[7][192][91]

By early 1975, Genie had started including do-support in some of her sentences; for instance, in June 1975 she said, "I do not have a red pail". Even then she frequently omitted it and only used it in negative sentences with phrases she had memorized, almost exclusively the phrase I do not have, causing Curtiss to speculate that Genie had memorized the words "I do" as an independent phrase as opposed to using the word "do" as a separate auxiliary word. Even then she often incorrectly used it, as in sentences such as, "I did not sad" (also from June 1975; Curtiss' interpretation of the sentence was, "I am not sad"), and frequently omitted it altogether. Curtiss recorded two utterances in which Genie used do-support in other types of sentences, "Do not like bird at school" and "Did paint".^[6][7][193] Of these, linguist Derek Bickerton noted that the latter was a response to an explicit question from Marilyn, "You wanta paint it [a picture] or are you trying to tell me you did paint it?"[emphasis as in the original]^[194][193]

Conversational abilities

During everyday interactions with other people Genie inconsistently applied what linguistic abilities she possessed, although her use of grammar remained better in imitation than in her own spontaneous speech.^[4][5][195] Her ability and willingness to engage in verbal interactions steadily increased during her stay with the Riglers, and she used her language to serve a progressively larger number of functions. Nonetheless, she continued to speak very little, and when she did talk it was almost always in utterances significantly shorter than she was actually able to spontaneously produce. Because of this, the scientists wrote that it was extremely difficult to analyze her comprehension and use of grammar in conversations.^[4][196]

Unusually for a first language learner, no one observed Genie engaging in any kind of experimentation with language.^[197] Sometimes, despite clearly demonstrating comprehension of an aspect of grammar, Genie would not use it in everyday interactions. For instance, even after learning to use imperatives she very rarely included them in her speech, and although she responded if called she would almost never call someone to her and seemingly never grasped the idea of doing so. While she could use imperatives in a scenario with Curtiss and the Riglers, she could not bring herself to say anything when the real situation arose.^{[5][198][194]} They also noted that if someone said to Genie, "If you want me, call my name" she invariably responded as if the person had told her to call his or her name.^[5]

In many cases, such as utilizing past tense or plural words, even if Genie demonstrated proficiency with an aspect of grammar and clearly understood the other person she would only use the correct words or markers if separately and specifically asked. If someone asked Genie a yes or no question she often repeated part of the question to indicate affirmation or said "no" even if she meant yes and was shaking her head the correct way, which Curtiss wrote was Genie simply repeating the last word of the sentence.^[5][120] By contrast, Genie frequently understood and could respond to highly complex questions that she showed no comprehension of on tests, especially interrogative questions, sentences requiring some degree of inference, or ones which performed both a locutionary and illocutionary act.^[8] Her comprehension of other complex sentence structures remained inconsistent in conversational settings, although beginning in November 1973 researchers recorded slow but noticeable improvement.^{[5][199][194]}

Besides measuring Genie's grammatical abilities in conversations, the scientists also attempted to measure her conversational competence. Most of the time, a conversation with Genie consisted either of someone asking her a question several times until she responded or her saying something to which the other person responded.^[200][150] Unless Genie was actively attempting to control the direction of a conversation, she relied on the other person to achieve and maintain the flow of the interaction. She was generally more willing to discuss topics which interested her, and was far more likely to respond if people were talking about these topics, although she would sometimes attempt to join in a conversation on other matters.^{[201][150][202]} At least once, in May 1975, she actively initiated a role-playing game with Curtiss during which they both had to speak, and although Genie did not talk very much she reportedly said two short phrases.^[97][97]

During an interaction, Genie typically did not acknowledge statements, requests, or other common pieces of conversation. When someone tried to tell her something she often would not show whether or not she had heard or understood them, and when she did respond there was often a significant delay. Curtiss wrote that Genie steadily decreased her response times in conversations during the course of her stay, although even by mid-1975 they were sometimes unusually long.^[5][203] If she did respond it was often a repetition of something which had been said earlier, and she used these repetitive statements to serve several conversational functions.^{[lower-alpha 15][204][200][150]} When Genie wanted to talk about something during the course of a conversation she would sometimes allow the subject to change, but often persisted by repeating herself even after someone had made multiple efforts to discuss something else.^{[103][201][120]}

When Genie was not perseverating on a specific subject she normally went along with a topic somebody else raised, and when attempting to enter an ongoing conversation she would try to say something relevant to what the other people were discussing. On one occasion in September 1973 Curtiss and Marilyn were talking about an upcoming family vacation the Riglers were planning, which they knew Genie was nervous about, and during their conversation Genie said "Little bit trip" to express a desire that the vacation be short. Besides showing Genie was listening to the people around her and was interested in conversation, it indicated she was willing to use language in new ways. If she could not say something semantically related to the topic of a conversation, she sometimes tried to join in using other means. Curtiss recalled one dinner conversation at the Riglers' home in 1972, in which several people had been using the word "tenant"; in an effort to contribute to the discussion, Genie said the word "ten" and held up ten fingers.^[5][205]

Genie steadily included more grammatical complexity in her speech during everyday interactions, and began to apply her language to more everyday situations.^[5][6] In late 1973 Genie noticed that the people around her were keeping track of everything she said, and at that time was extremely interested in people writing things down, so to the astonishment of everyone present she suddenly indicated she wanted people to write her speaking. She then talked in a series of short utterances that added up to a monologue much longer than any of her previously recorded speech and, while she did not use any words or grammar which she had not already fully mastered, she seemed to be using different words to try to expressing her thoughts and ideas, making it the closest she came to attempting language experimentation of any kind. Curtiss thought Genie was engaging in some sort of free association, and found Genie's verbal expression of entirely nonverbal events especially intriguing. After this linguists recorded Genie speaking at this length in a similar manner on a few more occasions, always in the same manner and on similar topics.^[197]

In the early summer of 1974 Genie began using language to describe fictional events, attempting on at least two occasions in the last two years of her stay with the Riglers to tell a lie. Soon after the first of these lies, in July of that year, she began to describe some of her fantasies to the scientists in language. Curtiss recorded one conversation Genie had with Marilyn in which Genie, who was discussing her desire to be with her bus driver, specifically expressed what she wanted him to do with her as if he had actually done so, but acknowledged that these events had not occurred when Marilyn pointed this out. Researchers considered both of these very substantial cognitive and linguistic gains.^[206][207]

In everyday interactions Genie became steadily more willing and able to speak during her stay with the Riglers, often spontaneously contributing to an ongoing discussion, and sometimes doing so even if the conversation did not initially involve her and was not specifically about her. Although she remained inconsistent at responding to other people, by mid-1975 she had shown significant improvement.^[208][200] Despite this Genie continued to speak far less than most people in equivalent phases of language acquisition, and her conversational competence remained very low.^[5][209] In her dissertation, Curtiss wrote that in many aspects Genie's overall demeanor continued to bear a strong resemblance to that of a person who had not been socialized.^[210][211] The scientists found Genie's inability to master conversational skills was unsurprising and suggested that the ability to engage in conversation was a separate skill from simply knowing language, which would make Genie's difficulty with conversation attributable to her lack of socialization during childhood instead of her language constraints.^{[4][212][200]}

To supplement Genie's language acquisition, once Genie started to combine words in her utterances the scientists worked to teach Genie ritual speech for common everyday situations. Soon after beginning to produce two-word utterances Genie learned the phrases "Give me [example]", "Help me [example]", and "I want [example]", and somewhat later the scientists also taught her to say "May I have [example]?".^{[lower-alpha 16][213]} Analyses of Genie's utterances beginning with "I want" concluded that Genie treated the phrase as one word, and noted that the dependent clauses could all have been separate utterances and never had markers indicating dependence. Linguists also noted that the phrase "Help me" always preceded a verb, whereas "Give me", "May I have", and "I want" always preceded nouns.^[214] In addition, since she could only use the word may as a part of the phrase "May I have" to ask a question and never produced a statement or asked about someone else with it, Curtiss did not consider these utterances to be true use of an auxiliary structure.^[215]

By contrast, Genie never learned to use any automatic speech and did not use interjections during conversations. Even if she was interested in speaking to someone she could not start an interaction with automatic speech, and efforts to teach her met with no success. She only responded to ritual questions, such as "How are you?", if someone repeatedly asked her and pushed her into responding; then she could say "How are you?" or "I am fine", but it would be very forced. The only time she gave any response was when the speaker had some additional affect, after which she usually laughed or tried to get the person to do it again.^{[lower-alpha 17][216][217]} In addition, Genie never learned any profanity nor ever used other substitute swear words.^[218][200] These aspects of speech are typically either bilateral or originate in the right hemisphere, and split-brain and hemispherectomy patients normally learn to use them without any difficulty, but this did not affect the scientists' assessment of Genie as an extremely right-hemisphere dominant thinker and Curtiss was not especially surprised that Genie never mastered them. She wrote that children normally learn these very early because they are exposed to conversational speech, but Genie's childhood gave her no opportunity to observe conversation.^[218][137]

Recalling past events

During a visit to Children's Hospital near Christmas 1971 a boy playing with a toy pistol frightened Genie, and when Curtiss tried to reassure her Genie responded with an abbreviated version of Curtiss' words, saying, "Little bad boy. Bad gun." About two weeks later Curtiss heard Genie saying something to herself and using a gesture she had invented for the word "naughty", and when Curtiss asked Genie what she said she repeated, "Little bad boy. Bad gun." out loud for several minutes, marking the first time she used language to refer to something in the past. After this, she began to speak about other past events.^[206][219] By the end of her stay, she was able to tell people about what someone else had said if the listener had not been present.^[220]

Several months into Genie's stay with the Riglers, David and Marilyn overheard her saying, "Father hit big stick. Father is angry." to herself, marking the first time she spoke about her life before starting to acquire language. For the rest of her stay, the Riglers said she constantly repeated "Father hit" to herself. Although she did not talk to others about her early life very often, during the rest of her stay the Riglers said she would speak to herself about her childhood. Later during her stay, she could provide longer and more detailed memories of her childhood.^{[9][103][221]}

Speech progress

Some of Genie's pronunciation rules and limitations were characteristic of typical General American English speakers, but many others were highly atypical.^[222] Her speech typically contained unusually extensive deletions and substitutions, including vowel reduction, neutralization, and consonant modifications, and she typically spoke in an unusually high-pitched and monotonic voice. Curtiss determined that, despite the unpredictability with which Genie applied many of her pronunciation rules, there were several clearly defined patterns in her speech.^[223][62] The scientists worked very hard to strengthen Genie's voice and improve her articulation but, despite significant improvements in both, as late as 1977 Curtiss wrote that Genie's articulation was so abnormal that it was extremely difficult to represent using standard IPA.^[222] The scientists believed that her abnormal pronunciation significantly masked her comprehension on a number of their grammar and morphology tests.^[5][60][224]

Despite Genie's unusual manner of speaking, her progress with learning to pronounce individual phonemes followed relatively normal patterns.^[4][5][225] Similar to young children, Genie's enunciation remained far better in imitation than in her own utterances.^[5][60] Some of Genie's pronunciation rules and phonological limitations were normal for General American English speakers; she never pronounced a voiceless glottal fricative at the end of a word or syllable coda, and only pronounced a final palatal approximant or labio-velar approximant as an off glide. When Genie substituted sounds she usually, although not always, replaced a sound with one that sounded fairly similar. She also never replaced a vowel with a consonant nor replaced a consonant with a vowel, indicating that she did limit the variability of her substitutions.^[222]

From the outset scientists could tell that Genie's vowel substitutions were clearly not random, but wrote that she did not seem to draw distinctions based on normal classification such as front versus back or open versus close vowels. She would frequently reduce diphthongs to monophthongs and lax the vowels, but this rule was optional and seemingly applied at random; when pronouncing the word "two", for example, she said it either as [tʊ] or [tu]^[5][226] Early on she invented a grammar rule allowing for devoicing of vowels and, although optional, even after she could better control her voice she would frequently devoice syllables, especially if the first consonant in a word or syllable was voiceless. Although she usually only applied this to a monosyllabic word or the first vowel of a multisyllabic word, sometimes she devoiced entire multisyllabic words or whole phrases; for instance, on at least one occasion she pronounced the word Christmas as [kr̥i̥ʲm̥i̥ʲ]. This made her speech, which was already very soft and breathy, sound even more so.^{[lower-alpha 18][227]}

As with vowels she would often either delete or substitute consonants, although the variability of her consonant pronunciation was considerably lower than that of vowels, and there were patterns to her deletions and substitutions.^[228][62] There were three sounds, the voiced dental fricative and the two standard affricate consonants—voiced and voiceless palato-alveolar affricates—which she did not spontaneously pronounce until 1973. If she did not outright delete them, she replaced them with different phonemes. After 1973 she only inconsistently pronounced these sounds, although Curtiss wrote that they underwent similar amounts of substitution and deletion as did other sounds in her speech.^[4][229] Until 1973, instead of pronouncing alveolar lateral approximants and retroflex approximants as separate sounds she articulated both in a manner that Curtiss described as a sound somewhere in between. After learning to pronounce them as distinct sounds, for the combinations /ɛr/ and /ar/ Genie invented an optional rule which permitted her to change their pronunciation to /ɛ^ʊ/ and /a^ʊ/ respectively.^[230]

In addition to individual phonemes, Genie typically simplified or deleted consonant clusters. The one regular exception to her consonant pronunciation rules was the rhotic approximant in a consonant cluster, which almost always remained intact, which Curtiss wrote was because Genie seemed to interpret it as a part of the preceding vowel instead of a separate consonant.^[231] At first, the only other consonant clusters she would pronounce were ones beginning with an /s/ followed by a liquid consonant.^[228][62] For initial consonant clusters consisting of an initial consonant preceding a liquid consonant Genie would simplify it, such as pronouncing the word "blouse" as /bæʷ/. For the first six months Genie had this rule it was mandatory, but after this time it became optional. In words with an initial obstruent followed by a liquid consonant she would frequently devoice the /l/, although this rule was optional; for instance, she pronounced the word claw as both [l̥ɔː] and [klɔː].^[230]

In normal speech Genie would frequently, but not always, delete the final consonant. The scientists speculated that, according to her grammar, the final consonant was optional. Researchers suspected this was why Genie did not usually use plural forms, possessive markers, and past tense or third person singular conjugations, despite her apparent comprehension of them.^[5][60] During her first two years of language acquisition she almost never pronounced final consonants, but started to do so more often in 1973. For a retroflex vowel at the end of a word, Genie had a separate optional rule allowing her to remove an /r/ which did not apply to the combination /ɛr/. With a final nasal consonant, Genie would inconsistently pronounce it; if she did not she either nasalized the preceding vowel or changed the consonant to a non-nasal, but never both.^[5]

The scientists determined that Genie's final consonant deletion rule did not follow any discernible pattern, and was always optional in her speech. Even during 1971 and 1972, there were some occasions when she pronounced final consonants; for instance, one day in mid-January 1972 she said "soup" both with and without the final /p/. Furthermore, if someone imitated her deletion of a final consonant she would laugh, reply, "Silly", gesture, and then say the word with both the final consonant and any sounds she had initially deleted. Curtiss speculated that Genie simply was not paying attention to how her speech sounded.^[232] As she spoke more often she began more frequently pronouncing final consonants, but she never used a voiceless labiodental fricative, a voiced bilabial stop, or a voiceless dental fricative to end a word. Curtiss was unsure of whether this was simply due to her frequent substitutions of these consonants or if this was a function of Genie's speech.^[229]

In addition to her deletions Genie would also frequently substitute consonants, although with considerably less variation than with vowels. In words with an initial or medial /m/ Genie often substituted the sounds /p/ or /b/, and for a medial or final /n/ she would substitute the sounds /t/ or /d/; both of these rules were always optional.^{[lower-alpha 19][233]} Until 1973, for an /ʃ/ sound Genie had an optional rule allowing her to either delete it or substitute the sound /sʲ/. The one exception was that prior to 1973, with only one deviation, in a word-final position she would simply delete the /ʃ/. Starting in 1973 she would still usually delete it at the end of a word, but when she did pronounce a final /ʃ/ she always articulated it as a /ʃ/ or a /t/.^[233] When Genie used voiceless stops to start a word, they were aspirated or unaspirated seemingly at random; for instance, she pronounced the word "ten" both as [tʰɛn] and [tæ̃].^[4][5]

For the sound /t͡ʃ/ Genie often substituted either an /t/ or /tʲ/, and for the sound /d͡ʒ/ she often substituted either /d/ or /dʲ/; for instance, she pronounced the word "chin" as [tɪ] and pronounced the word Jeep as [diʲːp].^[5][234] Both of these substitution rules were also optional, and she seemed to arbitrarily apply them. In a consonant cluster starting with the sound /s/, until 1973 she would always delete the /s/.^[235] For several months after starting to pronounce [t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ] she did not use either of these sounds as initial consonants, and inconsistently used them as final consonants. Similarly, when she began using longer words and sentences she often deleted unstressed syllables; for instance, she usually pronounced the word "refrigerator" as [frɪ].^[5][234] For the first few years after starting to speak she would regularly substitute the /t/ sound with a /k/, /n/, or /s/.^[4][5]

In November 1971, Genie displayed an ability to change pitch and volume while singing that she had never demonstrated in her speech. Around a week after the first time she sang, while on a trip to the hospital, Curtiss improvised a song to calm Genie down and Genie again surprised her by singing along. Curtiss especially noticed that Genie sang the word "hospital" far louder than she had ever spoken. Almost a year after moving in with the Riglers, while David Rigler was examining and cleaning her ear, to the great surprise of the scientists Genie uttered the only recorded scream of her lifetime. The scientists did not know why she had screamed on that particular occasion, or why they never heard her do so again.^[236][237]

Curtiss and Fromkin wrote that by 1973 Genie seemed to be slowly improving her articulation and that she had clearly strengthened and gained more control over her voice, although her pronunciation was still abnormal. During that year, Genie started to use pitch variation for stress as well. Vowel duration remained the primary method for doing so but became much less obtrusive and exaggerated, although she still did not vary her pitch or volume to indicate either questions or imperative sentences.^[115][238] While her voice remained largely monotonic, she began to utilize more speech patterns and intonation; she demonstrated some ability to do it in spontaneous speech, but it remained better in imitation.^[4][5][225] By at least mid-1973, when Curtiss administered tests designed to determine what sounds she could pronounce, she had the ability to distinguish and articulate all the sounds of General American.^[5][60] Despite this she still did not use either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives in spontaneous speech, even though she had been imitating them since June 1972, and inconsistently used affricates in her spontaneous speech.^[4][5][239]

In 1973 Genie began to articulate consonant clusters consisting of an /s/ sound followed by a nasal consonant, although this remained optional. For words starting with an /s/ followed by other types of consonant clusters Genie started to break up the cluster with an epenthetic schwa and soon after, in longer words where she would have previously deleted a vowel, she began to include a schwa where the deleted sound would have been; Curtiss thought Genie invented a grammar rule allowing her to either delete or reduce these vowels. Because reduced vowels in English are generally schwas, and she only used a schwa for this purpose, linguists thought it may have been evidence that she was gaining command of English phonology.^[4][5][240] In mid-1973 she began infrequently aspirating syllable and word final stops, and the following year, when she started to pronounce more final consonants, she would on rare occasions devoice a syllable stop or final consonant; for instance, she sometimes pronounced the word "rug" as [rukʰ]. Curtiss was unsure why Genie did this at all, and the frequent substitutions of consonants made it impossible for her to discern the reason for its rarity.^[241]

By 1974, the scientists wrote that although her speech remained behind her comprehension, her progress with both language and speech was occurring at the same rate. Genie's pronunciation of both liquid consonants had normalized, and her substitutions of /t/ sounds were now only occurring in medial consonants.^[4][60][242] Sometime during 1974 she created a rule, which was always optional, in which she would replace the sound /ɡ/ (/g/) with a /d/ and a /k/ with a /t/; for instance, the word green could be pronounced either [driː] or [griːn]. Although her application of this rule seemed arbitrary Curtiss believed that, because she did not substitute these sounds with random consonants, this was a true function of her speech.^[243]

By 1975 Genie had started to pronounce both /ð/ and /θ/, albeit rarely, in various word positions. When she did pronounce them she invented an optional rule allowing her to stop them by substituting them with a /d/ and /t/ respectively.^[243] In early 1975 the scientists tested her on 20 different English grammatical structures in 1975, her score was below the average level of a first-year second language English student. However, they later wrote that this was likely at least partially due to her frequent consonant cluster reduction/simplification and final consonant deletion, which were still very frequent in her speech at that time, as it was an oral test and took points off for excluding grammatical markers. Linguists therefore believed her actual knowledge of these structures was potentially significantly higher than the test results indicated.^[6]

In 1975 the scientists said that Genie's voice had clearly strengthened and she showed more obvious stress patterns in all of her spontaneous speech, modifying both pitch and volume for emphasis, but she continued to avoid speaking if possible because producing them remained extremely laborious for her. Her vocalizations were still soft and breathy, and they wrote that, "it is still very difficult to understand her if you have not been with her for a period of time."^{[60][62][244]} She still had considerable difficulty with controlling the pitch of her voice, and when she attempted to her entire body frequently stiffened from effort and concentration.^[4][6][244] In mid-1975 she could speak with a relatively normal declarative sentence stress pattern, and began to do so with increasing frequency, but remained unable to use intonation to indicate a question.^[4][60][245] Even then her pronunciation also remained abnormal, as she still frequently deleted and substituted sounds in her speech. In her dissertation, Curtiss wrote that Genie typically laxed and centralized the pronunciation of both vowels and off-glides.^[245]

Haplologies

When Genie started forming longer sentences, she often produced extreme and intentional haplologies. She frequently omitted morphological elements which were necessary to make the utterance grammatical but were clear to present observers. Curtiss cited the utterance "Mike paint" because, while in isolation it could either have meant Mike's paint or Mike paints, Genie said it as Mike—the pseudonym for one of the Riglers' children—painted a cabinet.^[246][247] Although this is normal for young children at the outset of language acquisition they typically decrease these omissions as they learn more grammar, but Genie continued to do so throughout acquisition. Linguists speculated that Genie had an early grammar rule mandating the omission of grammatical elements which were non-essential in context, but later made this an optional rule.^[248]

At other times Genie condensed and deleted sounds, syllables, or entire words in such a way that she rendered her speech ambiguous. For no discernible reason, sometimes she said the same sentence with and without any omissions; on one day in September 1973, Curtiss recorded Genie saying the same sentence as both "Take shopping" and "Take me shopping".^[249][250] In addition to making it difficult to understand her this made it hard to be completely certain about Genie's linguistic abilities, and researchers speculated this may have led to her scores being significantly lower on certain language analysis tests.^[5][60][224] In May 1972, by which time Genie regularly spoke in three or four-word utterances, she attempted to truncate several of her sentences to monosyllables, pronouncing the sentence "Marilyn come back" as [mæ̃k] and "Monday Curtiss come" as [mʌ̃k]. Marilyn and Curtiss then told Genie they could not talk to her if she spoke in such a manner, and she then stopped attempting such extreme haplologies but continued to condense sounds when possible.^[251][250]

Nonverbal communication

Even while speaking, Genie continued to use supplementary nonverbal gestures to improve her intelligibility. Prior to mid-1974 she invented gestures to indicate specific phonemes and homonyms, which she used regardless of semantic context; for instance, when she created a gesture for the sound /tɛn/ she used it when she said either the word "ten" or "tenant". Sometimes Genie would use one gesture for two similar-sounding but not completely identical words, such as her use of the same gesture for both the words "disappear" and "disappointed". Prior to receiving sign language instruction, she never applied any of these gestures to more than one word based on anything besides phonetic value. This was markedly different from previous observations of people inventing their own gesture systems, which had documented people exclusively creating and using gestures to indicate semantic meaning.^[252]

With some words Genie would pantomime them as she spoke; for instance, the scientists noted she would crouch into a seated position when she said the words "sit" or "sick". Although this is normal to some degree among children, it is generally ancillary to their speech and becomes less prominent as they acquire more language. By contrast, Genie continued to use these movements as an integral part of her vocabulary. Genie would also act out events, and to encourage Genie to talk Curtiss devised a game in which she and Genie created short sentences which they then simultaneously spoke and acted out.^[39][5] During her stay with the Riglers she began to draw pictures if she could not express herself in words, and she sometimes used existing pictures from magazines or books to relate to daily experiences.^{[103][39][253]} Curtiss and Fromkin unsuccessfully tried to teach Genie to read and write, and in 1973 Curtiss stopped her efforts, although other people made subsequent attempts; by the time Curtiss presented her dissertation Genie had learned to read approximately five to ten names and words, and could write individual letters in print.^[4][254]

While living with the Riglers Genie gradually began to outwardly exhibit more of her emotions, both positive and negative. Curtiss wrote that a major breakthrough she observed occurred when, upon going to the Riglers' house one morning in 1972, she found Genie in tears because she was feeling sick and Marilyn had just told Genie that she needed to see a doctor.^[255][256] Throughout the time Genie lived with the Riglers, they and the other scientists saw how frequently and effectively Genie used her nonverbal skills. For reasons the scientists never managed to discern she still seemed to be able to communicate her desires to complete strangers without speaking, and everybody who worked with her remembered several times during her stay when someone gave her something or did something for her despite her not saying a word. In several interviews years later, David Rigler recounted an occasion when he and Genie passed a father and a young boy carrying a toy firetruck when, even though they had not spoken to each other, the boy suddenly turned around and gave the firetruck to Genie.^[9][257]

To take advantage of Genie's nonverbal expressiveness, in 1974 the Riglers arranged for her to receive sign language instruction; Curtiss described the type of sign language Genie learned as being, "a system of signing somewhere between American Sign Language and signed English in its grammatical system."^[258][259] Curtiss wrote that as soon as Genie started learning sign language, she would often simultaneously speak and sign. Even when learning sign language Genie continued to use and invent her own gestures, but while she continued to use her existing gestures for individual phonemes she started creating new ones to convey a semantic meaning.^[9][260] The scientists did not specifically test Genie's sign language, and Curtiss did not sit in on Genie's sign language sessions, but noted a few aspects of her progress. Curtiss recorded that by February 1975 Genie could use the sign to indicate a plural, and that by the spring of 1975 could correctly use the sign indicating past tense. In addition, in response to a request to start a sentence in sign language with the word he Genie produced "The boy signing is he cookie".^[261]

Post-1975

In June 1975, despite Genie's progress the National Institute of Mental Health cut off their support for the case study on Genie.^{[9][262][263]} Shortly afterwards, in the early summer of 1975, Genie moved out of the Riglers' home and began to live with her mother. Despite the grant ending Curtiss continued to regularly meet with her, both to continue administering weekly tests and to spend time with her outside of the test sessions, and the Riglers maintained contact with Genie and her mother.^[264][265] While living with her mother, Genie continued to be largely unresponsive to statements or requests. After a few months, Genie's mother had her transferred to the first of what would become a succession of foster homes.^{[9][266][267]}

Selected utterances^[7]

Utterance	Date	Curtiss' gloss (if any)
I want live back Marilyn house.	November 1975	I want to go back to Marilyn's house to live.
Genie Mama have a father long time ago.	December 1975	N/A
Spool wind thread.	December 1976	N/A
Think about Mama love Genie.	August 1977	I am thinking about my wish that that fact [sic] that Mama loves Genie.
Do not through. I want through.	October 1977	That box is opaque. I want the kind you can see through.
Hot dog eat, eat the hot dog, eat hot dog.	November 1977	N/A

Soon after moving into this foster home the people running it began subjecting Genie to extreme physical and psychological abuse, causing her to rapidly regress and return to her coping mechanism of silence.^[9][268] The incident with the largest impact occurred when they severely beat her for vomiting and told her that if she did it again she would never see her mother, rapidly accelerating her regression and making her extremely scared of opening her mouth for anything, including speaking, out of fear of vomiting and facing more punishment. As she still wanted to communicate with people she knew, she began almost exclusively using the sign language she learned while living with the Riglers.^{[9][267][268]} During this time Curtiss was the only person who had worked with Genie to have any regular contact with her, meeting once a week to continue testing, and she wrote that Genie's speech severely deteriorated due to the abuse she endured. Curtiss later recalled Genie frenetically signing to her on a variety of topics, but said she could not bring herself to open her mouth so she could speak. At one point while living in this home, she refused to talk for five months.^[150][266]

Upon Genie's removal from this location in April 1977, due to her condition she required a two-week stay at Children's Hospital. While there she was able to see her mother and the Riglers, and her condition somewhat improved, but she continued mostly using sign language for communication.^[9][266] At that time, Curtiss and Fromkin obtained a year-long grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their work with Genie.^[7][269] After her stay at Children's Hospital authorities moved to another foster home for several months, an arrangement in which Genie reportedly did fairly well but which unexpectedly ended in late 1977. After giving her temporary accommodations through the end of December of that year, authorities then moved her into a different location. In early January 1978 Curtiss wrote that every one of these moves was very hard on Genie, causing continued regression in all aspects of her life, and that their frequency heightened their traumatic impact.^[7][267]

In 1976 Curtiss finished and presented her dissertation, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", which analyzed the progression of Genie's language from the time of her admission to Children's Hospital until the early summer of 1975. It received reviews from several prominent scientists, and the following year Academic Press published it.^[103][3] Curtiss continued her testing and observations throughout 1977, and recorded the last of Genie's published utterances in November of that year.^{[7][150][202]} After Curtiss met with her on January 3, 1978, Genie's mother suddenly prevented her and all of the other linguists from seeing Genie, entirely ending all of their testing and evaluations. In early 1978 several of the scientists stated an intent to continue working with and testing Genie, but were never able to carry out their planned exams.^[6][11][270] On March 30, 1978, the court officially turned guardianship of Genie over to her mother, and despite several requests during the following years she forbade all of the scientists except for Jay Shurley from seeing Genie as well.^[7]

Post-1977

In early 1978 Curtiss conducted another analysis of Genie's language, although she did not release any new linguistic data at that time, and published Genie's utterances from after mid-1975 and analysis of them in papers she wrote and co-wrote in 1979.^{[6][150][202]} Of these utterances, 4 were dated between mid-1975 and April 1977—including only one from 1976—and 34 were dated between April and December 1977. Curtiss did not state whether these represent all of her observed speech from these time frames.^{[7][150][202]} After this, despite the lack of new data Curtiss continued to analyze Genie's language in later papers.^{[271][151][272]}

Between early 1978 and mid-1993 Genie moved through several more institutions and foster homes, some of which subjected her to extreme levels of abuse and harassment.^[9][273] Shurley saw Genie at least twice after 1977, at her 27th birthday party in 1984 and again two years later, and later recalled that both times she barely talked, made almost no outward expressions of any kind, and made very little eye contact. In 1992 Curtiss said that she had only heard two updates on Genie's condition since 1977, both indicating she almost never spoke. When author Russ Rymer published his book on Genie in 1993, he wrote that as of 1992 she very rarely spoke. In a 1994 afterword to his book he wrote that in early 1993 Genie's mother told him Genie was more verbal, albeit hard to understand.^[274] The Riglers reestablished contact with Genie and her mother in mid-1993, and David Rigler wrote that when he and Marilyn saw Genie for the first time in 15 years she immediately recognized and greeted both of them by name.^[13]

The latest available information on Genie's speech came in May 2008. That year ABC News reported that, in 2000, someone speaking to them under condition of anonymity had hired a private investigator who located Genie. According to the investigator, she only spoke a few words but could still communicate fairly well in sign language.^[2] In 2002 Curtiss said that she would be interested in measuring Genie's linguistic abilities again but, as of May 2008, she had not seen Genie since January 1978.^[2][11]

Impact

Genie's is one of the best-known cases of language acquisition in a child with delayed linguistic development.^[7][9][120] Curtiss argued that Genie's case supported Chomsky's hypothesis of innate language, but that Genie demonstrated the necessity of early language stimulation in the left hemisphere of the brain to start.^{[lower-alpha 20][4][275][8]} Because Genie had learned vocabulary and clearly mastered some principles of grammar Curtiss contended that she definitively disproved more extreme conceptualizations of the critical period hypothesis, which predicted that no language acquisition of any kind could occur after the critical period. 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.^[8][276]

Furthermore, Curtiss argued that only language, and not any other cognitive stimulation, could initiate the lateralization of language. She pointed out that even though Genie had experienced enough environmental stimulation as a child to commence lateralization of other brain functions, her language center had not developed in her left hemisphere.^[277][278] Without the required stimulation, a person would be rendered incapable of processing language from the left hemisphere of the brain and would be forced to only use the right hemisphere.^[279][277] The contrast between Genie's vocabulary and grammar acquisition also further bolstered the existing hypothesis that these two processes underwent separate development during language acquisition.^[103][280] Genie's inability to master language despite the clear progress in her cognitive development in other areas also suggested that language acquisition was separate from cognition, a new concept at the time.^[8][281]

Genie's inability to engage in normal interactions with other people also provided more evidence that understanding the principles of language was a separate skill from the ability to engage in conversations.^{[282][200][137]} In addition, her rapid progress with nonverbal communication and her exceptional proficiency at it demonstrated that even nonverbal communication was fundamentally separate from language.^{[283][8][120]} Her arguments have become widely accepted in the field of linguistics and other linguists, including Steven Pinker and James Hurford, have cited Genie's case study as evidence for Chomsky's hypothesis of innate language and for of a steadily progressing version of the critical period.^{[280][284][279]} Curtiss' findings were also the impetus for several additional studies on both delayed and abnormal language acquisition.^[285][286]

Analysis of the aspects of grammar that Genie did and did not acquire aided linguists in determining which structures were more dependent on exposure to language. Prior to Genie's discovery the auxiliary component of language had been known to be one of the few children acquire at different rates depending on the amount of speech they heard, and Genie's inability to master it supported the idea that its development and that of other similar systems of grammar is more sensitive than vocabulary or more basic grammar, such as word order or recursion, requiring a more conducive language environment to properly develop and having a more specific critical period.^{[103][280][279]} Linguists also noted the grammatical skills Genie acquired and used bore striking resemblance to the grammar of pidgin languages and the gesture systems deaf children invent when isolated from other deaf people. While both of these forms of communication contain certain aspects of language, such as vocabulary, recursion, and word order, other components such as auxiliary structures are never present.^{[284][287][278]}

Because Genie acquired language in her right hemisphere, Genie's language acquisition refined existing hypotheses and gave rise to additional propositions about what parts of language the right hemisphere was capable of acquiring after the critical period.^[6][103] Despite a few marked differences with previous studies of adult split-brain and left hemispherectomy patients, her linguistic development had remained largely congruous with theirs.^{[6][280][277]} By contrast, people with the same conditions who had begun acquiring language in their right hemispheres prior to the end of the critical period had developed normal vocabulary and grammar. This further convinced the scientists that Genie's language acquisition was abnormal because she had started after the critical period, and therefore was processing language in the right hemisphere of her brain.^[6][288]

Genie's case has also been used in theorizing about whether the critical period hypothesis can be applied to the acquisition of a second language, a topic which remains the subject of considerable debate.^{[289][290][291]}

Earlier cases

Several people who have analyzed Genie's linguistic development have compared it to historical accounts of children with delayed language acquisition, including language deprivation experiments which Psamtik I, King James IV of Scotland, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II purportedly carried or attempted to carry out.^[4][5] In particular, linguists have especially noted the similarities between Genie's case study and the testing of Victor of Aveyron. Both during and after the case study the scientists acknowledged the impact these cases had on their research and testing methods.^{[9][292][293]} Author Justin Leiber wrote that Victor likely presented a more difficult case from which to extrapolate information because, unlike Victor, Genie had demonstrated significant cognitive abilities and mental development in several areas despite her lack of language.^[294] Linguists and historians have also cited Genie's case as the impetus for reanalysis of these earlier cases, both comparing their language acquisition to Genie's and reassessing their value to the field of language acquisition.^[295][296]

Scientists also measured Genie's language acquisition against more modern studies. Leiber compared Genie to Helen Keller and noted that, while Keller had learned language through extensive instruction, the scientists who worked with Genie primarily measured her language acquisition through passive exposure. He wrote that in doing so they had given her far less structure, and he speculated that this could have made it more difficult for her to succeed.^[294] Both the research team and outside analyses especially wrote about the differences between Genie and a case in the 1950s of a girl known by the name Isabella. During her early childhood the only human contact Isabella had was with her deaf mother, and she had been isolated from all speech until the age of 6. After authorities discovered her they gave her access to therapy, and psychologists monitored her progress; within a year after teachers began working with Isabella she successfully acquired language, with reports stating that she was using both vocabulary and grammar typical for someone her age.^[4][297]

Debate

Scientific value

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 that this rendered it impossible to be completely certain about the utility of studying her language acquisition. During his sleep studies Shurley had uncovered, among a few other persistent abnormalities in her sleep, a highly elevated number of sleep spindles, which are characteristic of people born with severe retardation.^[9][29][298] However, the linguists who studied Genie firmly believed that she possessed at least average intelligence at birth, and that the abuse and isolation she suffered during her childhood had left her functionally retarded. Curtiss specifically noted that some of Genie's linguistic capabilities, such as her clear ability to distinguish gender in her speech, were very uncharacteristic of someone born mentally retarded.^[4][33][299] Other linguists analyzing Genie's case, including Steven Pinker, have concurred with Curtiss' position.^[278]

The scientists acknowledged that Genie's extreme emotional difficulties may have contributed to delaying her acquisition of a few pieces of grammar, and at the beginning may have partially explained her very tacit demeanor, but Curtiss and Fromkin repeatedly maintained that her emotional profile could not have impeded her ability to acquire language.^{[45][138][300]} They pointed out that she had clearly progressed in other aspects of her psychological development and was generally happy during their testing, and argued it was extremely implausible that emotional difficulties could interfere with her grammar acquisition without affecting her vocabulary.^{[262][300][247]} Several linguists, including Pinker and Derek Bickerton, accepted Curtiss and Fromkin's assessment while a few, including Stephen Laurence, questioned this position but nonetheless considered her case highly valuable.^{[247][278][301]} Other linguists, including Geoffrey Sampson, argued that the severity of her emotional difficulties made this extremely implausible and negated much of the scientific significance ascribed to her case.^[302]

Assessment of Genie

From the start of the case study on Genie until the end of 1977, the scientists' writings and presentations on Genie's language acquisition expressed varying degrees of optimism about Genie's progress. All of the papers leading up to Curtiss' dissertation discussed specific improvements in Genie's grammar and vocabulary.^[4][5][303] In her dissertation Curtiss argued that, while Genie's speech was still considerably different from that of most people, her, "language performance often does not reflect her underlying linguistic ability".^[304] She further wrote that Genie was still learning more language at the time of writing and considered it possible that she could complete acquisition, expressing hope that, "she [Genie] will have the last word."^[7][305] An independent 2006 review of Genie's case concluded that Curtiss' dissertation displayed an unwarranted level of positivity about Genie's progress and prognosis; it pointed out that even by the time of its completion, Genie's language had clearly regressed from her treatment in foster care.^[262]

Curtiss' accounts of Genie after her dissertation all acknowledged that Genie's vocabulary had steadily broadened, similar to her earlier analyses, and argued that she clearly acquired and used a few principles of grammar.^[306][271] However, they all had more negative evaluations of Genie's speech and argued that she had never learned any meaningful amount of grammar after all; in one, she referred to Genie's speech as "grammatically uninflected and telegraphic".^[6][8][202] In a 1992 interview with Russ Rymer Curtiss said Genie's progress had very quickly plateaued and it took her several years to realize it, and Rymer wrote that, based on her comments and some documents she shared with him, she seemed to view the summer of 1972 as the point at which Genie's linguistic abilities stopped advancing.^[307] In a 1994 interview for a Nova documentary on Genie, Curtiss said that Genie could communicate semantic messages using language but did not speak in real sentences, citing the utterances "Spot chew glove" and "Applesauce buy store" as examples.^[7][9]

Outside analysis from Peter Jones, a linguistics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, argued that Curtiss' earlier accounts of Genie's speech, up to and including her dissertation, were more accurate than those from after 1977. He wrote that, in these later papers, Curtiss used only small samples of Genie's speech to prove her points when a more representative look appeared to contradict Curtiss' arguments.^[7][150] Jones also argued that Curtiss did not provide sufficient evidence for many of her later conclusions, saying that she neither examined the utterances she cited in significant detail nor presented them in a manner conducive to doing so. In a few instances, Jones asserted that Curtiss' data outright contradicted her conclusions.^{[lower-alpha 21][7]}

Jones also noted that despite Genie's regression after mid-1975, in 1977 Curtiss wrote that Genie was continuing to acquire grammar. He speculated that the reason Curtiss had changed her view of Genie's language was because of this regression, and noted that she only discussed it and its cause—which he said had been essential context for understanding her language development—in an interview with Rymer during the early 1990s, and never mentioned them in any of her papers. He wrote that Curtiss did not release enough information about Genie's speech from after mid-1975 to determine exactly what, if any, grammatical abilities she had lost, and that the complete lack of data from any time after January 1978 rendered it impossible to determine the extent to which her language had regressed.^[7][3][308] Despite the different tone of Curtiss' later works, Jones wrote that he found nothing either suggesting reevaluation of her earlier arguments or disavowal of any of her earlier conclusions. Finally, he wrote that she supplied no evidence to back up her statement to Rymer, and pointed out that the two utterances referenced in the Nova documentary were from early December 1971 and April 1972 respectively, which he argued were not representative of Genie's most advanced speech.^[7][9][309]

Although Jones said it was not possible to draw definite conclusions because of the relatively few utterances Genie produced, in a 1995 paper he concluded the discrepancies he noted in Curtiss' later analyses of Genie demonstrated that, "the post-(1977) account [of Genie's speech] is not so much based on reanalysis or reinterpretation of the data but on a highly selective and misleading misrepresentation of the earlier findings."[emphasis as in the original]^[7] This, in turn, left an unresolved tension between Curtiss' pre- and post-1977 analyses which he said meant that until Curtiss published a clarification of her analyses, "a definitive judgment on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given."^[7] In 2014 Jones maintained these arguments, and noted that no additional outside analysis of Genie's utterances and Curtiss' papers had occurred since his paper.^[310] Others discussing Genie's case have since cited Jones' arguments, and similarly questioned Curtiss' later analyses of Genie's grammar acquisition. To this point, neither Curtiss nor anyone else directly associated with Genie's case has responded to Jones' arguments.^{[311][312][313]}

See also

• A Man Without Words

Notes

1. For instance, in a tape from November 23rd Genie followed Kent's instructions when he handed her a rattle and told her, "Don't let the bunny get that rattle!" before trying to take it with a puppet of a rabbit. Kent told linguists that he was unsure of whether he had played that game with her before, leading them to believe Genie might have acted solely based on her understanding the negative command and the words bunny and rattle.
2. Eric Lenneberg stated that he did not have any desire to study Genie and declined to participate, saying no definite conclusions could be drawn because the level of trauma associated with Genie's childhood would be impossible to discern.
3. She also wrote that the man she was dating, who had moved in with her during Genie's stay and was a well known psychologist and retired professor from the University of Southern California, had recently commented on Genie's talkativeness, calling her "my little yakker".
4. Curtiss wrote that Genie referred to her by her last name.
5. Although she had used other two-word verbs before, such as "Get it", Curtiss distinguished these from the two-word verbs Genie used in early 1972 because Genie was clearly putting the two words together instead of treating them as one word.
6. In late 1973 she temporarily used the word in for both in and on, but Curtiss believed she simply merged the sounds and did not actually confuse the words.
7. When not looking at the pictures Curtiss used for this test Genie would often misinterpret the word her as either my or your; conversely, when looking at the pictures, she would only mistake it for the word his.
8. To make requests, the scientists wrote that she would usually either point to something, use facial expressions, or repeat what appeared to be a declarative sentence until someone recognized it was intended as a question.^[6]
9. There was some question among the scientists over whether one utterance, "Marilyn said not lift my leg in the dentist chair", was truly an instance of embedding. Because Genie sometimes confused my and your, Curtiss wrote that it was unclear if she was trying to explain in her own words what Marilyn had said to her or if she had only reversed the pronouns while attempting to quote Marilyn.
10. Even in this utterance Curtiss wrote that, because Genie had not included the word and, it was unclear whether the sentence truly contained a compound verb phrase or if it was a for–to complement sentence.
11. Curtiss noted that despite this, in sentences with noun phrases that entirely consisted of nouns such as, "She is feeding him" Genie would not reverse the pronouns; the one time she made a mistake, she quickly recognized it and gave the correct answer. This meant that, for the pronoun tests, she was using some form of a word order strategy.
12. Curtiss noted two complicating factors on this test. One was that one of the pictures she used may have been confusing for Genie, which may have somewhat lowered her scores. The other was that Genie had a 50% chance of getting a correct answer just from guessing, which was a significantly higher percentage than most of Curtiss' other tests.^[184]
13. Scientists wrote this supported a hypothesis, first proposed in 1970, that children steadily improve comprehension of these sentences for approximately four years before temporarily perceiving the first noun as the subject and the second as the object in all cases. Although it predicted this would be more pronounced in children with a right-ear language preference the scientists thought that, since Genie's brain had not undergone normal lateralization, her right hemisphere may have taken up the function causing this.
14. Linguists recorded one instance of Genie verbally counting "thirty-eight, thirty-nine, thirty-ten", which Curtiss wrote demonstrated Genie's willingness to use language in inventive ways.
15. For instance, when Genie first moved in with the Riglers, if she wanted to discuss something she would say "[example] hurt", as shown in utterances such as "Doctor hurt" and even though Curtiss could tell that Genie also knew the lexical meaning of the word hurt she used this word regardless of whether it was related to the subject she was raising. In 1972, she began using the phrase "I like [example]" in an identical manner to serve this purpose, and as with the word "hurt" it was clear to the scientists that Genie also understood the lexical meaning of the phrase "I like", which she demonstrated in many other utterances.
16. Curtiss also noted that just using this phrase in and of itself did not guarantee that Genie would receive what she asked for.
17. Once she began using the word like, if she wanted to greet someone she would usually say "like [X]" or, after learning to use the pronoun I, "I like [X]".
18. Curtiss also documented several other substitution rules for single vowels, but these occurred with much less frequency and consistency.
19. Although Curtiss could not be sure, she thought Genie's creation of two distinct substitution rules for these phonemes could have demonstrated a difference between her nasalization of an /m/ versus an /n/ sound.
20. Curtiss noted that the critical period was not, as Lenneberg suggested in 1967, connected with the initial lateralization of brain functions. In 1967 this process was believed to finalize at or close to puberty, but research from Stephen Krashen and Richard Harshman in the early 1970s found that it occurs around the age of five. Prior to Genie's case there were documented instances of children beginning successful first language acquisition at the age of 6 or 7, and a study of children up to 11 years old recovering from brain damage yielded no evidence suggestive of a critical period.
21. For example, in 1978 Curtiss wrote that Genie's use of internal negation and do-support was not a meaningful improvement because there were so few instances in which she used them. Jones argued that her using these at all proved that Genie was learning negation and therefore continuing to acquire language.^[7]

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Sources and further reading

• Aitchison, Jean (1989), The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (3 ed.), New York, NY: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-41-508395-9, OCLC 802910308.
• Benzaquén, Adriana Sylvia (2006), "Confinement and Freedom", Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature, Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 244–264, ISBN 978-0-77-352972-4, OCLC 61427587.
• Bickerton, Derek (1990), "The Fossils of Language", Language and Species, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-22-604610-5, OCLC 802686883.
• Brown, Lisa J.; Jones, Peter E. (2014), "Language Development After Extreme Global Deprivation", Bringing Back the Child: Language Development after Extreme Deprivation, Newcastle upon Tyne, U. K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 6–38, ISBN 978-1-44-385972-1, OCLC 893890618.
• Curtiss, Susan (1989), "The Independence and Task-Specificity of Language", in Bornstein, Marc H.; Bruner, Jerome S., Interaction in Human Development, Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology Series, Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, pp. 105–138, ISBN 978-0-80-580035-7, OCLC 19127931.
• Curtiss, Susan (1977), Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Boston, MA: Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-12-196350-7, OCLC 3073433.
• Curtiss, Susan (1982), "Developmental dissociations of language and cognition" (PDF), in Obler, Loraine K.; Menn, Lise, Exceptional Language and Linguistics, Perspectives in Neurolinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Psycholinguistics, New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 285–312, doi:10.1017/S0022226700010197, ISBN 978-0-12-523680-5, OCLC 8410214, retrieved May 1, 2013.
• Curtiss, Susan (1988a), "The special talent of grammar acquisition" (PDF), in Obler, Loraine K.; Fein, Deborah, The Exceptional Brain: Neuropsychology of Talent and Special Abilities, Guilford, NY: Guilford Press, pp. 364–386, ISBN 978-0-89-862701-5, OCLC 14719594, retrieved May 2, 2013.
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