Genie, a modern-day Wild Child

Acute social deprivation

Genie (not Jeanie, Geanie, Jeannie or Geannie and, in any case, not her real name) is a modern-day "wild child" who, until discovery at the age of 13, had lived in a state of severe sensory and social deprivation. Strapped to a potty-chair in her home in Temple City, Los Angeles, California, Genie wasn't taught to speak, and was denied normal human interaction.

Read the full story of Genie

Scroll down for The Story of Genie. You can also read more about Genie online in The Civilizing of Genie by Maya Pines, a chapter from Teaching English through the Disciplines: Psychology. You can also read this transcript from the NOVA documentary on Genie.

Donations

If you are interested in contributing to the care of Genie, you should make a donation to the San Gabriel/Pomona Valleys Foundation. The donation will not go directly to Genie, but to support the work of the Foundation, of which Genie is a client. Checkes should be made payable to the San Gabriel/Pomono Valley Foundation.

Genie and Language Acquisition

The case of Genie, and the difficulties she faced in learning to speak, are widely quote as evidence for the critical period hypothesis. However, read Jones (Contradictions And Unanswered Questions In The Genie Case) for a critical review of the way in which the evidence from Genie has been represented in different ways at different times.

What happened to Genie?

For the latest news on Genie, see "References" at the bottom of the right-hand column. In particular, the stories "Wild Child Speechless After Tortured Life" and "Raised by a Tyrant, Suffering a Sibling's Abuse" contain new and current information (May 2008).

When she reached 18, Genie was returned to the care of her mother, where she stayed only a few months. Genie then lived in six different foster homes (sometimes receiving further abusive treatment), and then moved to sheltered accommodation (a care home for adults who cannot live alone) in Southern California. Here are two letters from Dr Stephen Black, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Bishop's University, Quebec, Canada:

The following was posted to the Society for Teaching of Psychology list, August 21, 2004:

Little information is available. As Mark Walter noted in an earlier post, Russ Rymer, who wrote the definitive account of the whole sad story (Genie: an Abused Child's Flight From Silence (1993), aka "Genie: A Scientific Tragedy"), provided a brief update. According to Rymer (in his 1992 account in The New Yorker magazine), Dr. Jay Shurley, one of the group who had studied her, showed Rymer two disturbing photographs of "a large, bumbling woman with a facial expression of cowlike incomprehension". Of the second photograph, Shurley said:

"Her twenty-seventh birthday party...I was there, and then I saw her again when she was twenty-nine, and she still looked miserable. She looked to me like a chronically institutionalized person. It was heartbreaking… She looks demented".

On the other hand, David Rigler, the chief psychologist at the hospital where Genie was treated, and Genie's temporary foster parent, said in a 1993 letter to the New York Times (his sole comment, as far as I know, against charges that he exploited Genie):

"As I write this, Genie is again living in a board-and-care home, this time under happier circumstances. Genie visits her mother regularly. My wife and I were invited to visit her in the company of her mother. Although we had not seen her for more than 15 years, we all of us cried as she greeted us by name".

Finally, my former student Dr. Shannon Gadbois, now professor of psychology at Brandon University, wrote to ask Susan Curtiss the same question, and she posted Dr. Curtiss's reply on the TIPS (Teaching in Psychological Science) discussion list in 2001.

Shannon reported that Dr. Curtiss said:

1. Genie is in an adult care facility that Dr. Curtiss described as "atypical" in that it offers exceptional exposure to events and activities. Each year Genie travels with her group to Las Vegas to play slot machines and explore. They also go on regular outings and have "social functions" at the care home.

2. Dr. Curtiss said that, unfortunately, Genie's language skills have deteriorated as has her ability to sign (she really has no one with whom she can "practice" signing). Despite these setbacks, Dr. Curtiss said that Genie is still "a powerhouse of zest for life".

3. Dr. Curtiss also said that not one member of the team that worked with Genie has been permitted to see her. Her mother, as of last year, was still the legal guardian, and had forbidden the team members to see Genie. Dr. Curtiss receives all of her information through Genie's social worker.

I've also had students tell me they were told by another (always unidentified) instructor that Genie had died of cancer. As far as I know, this rumour is false. Possibly it originated with confusion with the death Jean Butler Ruch, Genie's sometimes teacher and adversary of Curtiss and Rigler. She died of stroke in 1989. A colleague suggested it was Genie's mother, Irene, who had died of cancer, but I haven't been able to verify that either.

Stephen L. Black, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. Bishop's University, Quebec, Canada

The following was posted to the TIPS (Teaching in Psychological Science) discussion group, November 30, 2007:

I've just replied to an e-mail inquiry from a high school teacher concerning whether Genie, the tragic "wild child" of California, has died. I told her I had no information on Genie's death, although I believed that Jean Butler, Genie's one-time teacher, and also Genie's mother, have both died.

Here's the news part. I tried my own Google search on the question. I discovered that in 2005 David Rigler, the one-time primary investigator of the team studying Genie, transferred all his Genie-related materials to Susan Curtiss. She was (at that time) the graduate student who, by general agreement, produced the only scientifically-useful information on this sad case, published as the book _Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern Day "Wild Child_" (1977).

Curtiss in turn donated the collection to the UCLA library in 2006, where it is available with permission of the library for study. It apparently includes the neglected videotapes shot by David Rigler which were salvaged by the NOVA TV crew, and some of which were subsequently incorporated into their documentary "Secret of the Wild Child" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html ).

These materials are not available on-line, but the catalogue listing of the holdings are themselves interesting to browse through. See http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt0q2nc69q&chunk.id=did-1.2.1&brand=oac

On the question of Genie's death, the catalogue says this (under "Biography"): "Although not indicated in the collection files, according to Russ Rymer… by the early 1990s Genie was living in an adult home for the mentally retarded, where it is believed she remains in 2006."

Stephen L. Black, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. Bishop's University, Quebec, Canada

The Story of Genie

On November 4, 1970 a girl was discovered. She had been locked in a room alone for over ten years. She was tied to a potty chair and left to sit alone day after day. At night, she was tied into a sleeping bag which restrained her arms. She was put into an over-sized crib with a cover made of metal screening. Often she was forgotten. On those nights she slept tied to the potty chair.

At first, people could hardly believe that Genie was thirteen years old. While she seemed to understand a few words, the only words she could say were, "stopit" and "nomore." She had a strange bunny-like walk— she held her hands up in front of her like paws and moved in a halting way. She could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow. She spat constantly. She sniffed. She was not toilet-trained and could not focus her eyes beyond 12 feet. She weighed 59 pounds and was 54 inches tall.

Genie was rescued and put in Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Genie's mental and physical development began almost immediately. By the third day in the hospital, Genie began helping dress herself and using the toilet voluntarily. She began moving more smoothly. She was hungry to learn words, pointing at things until people would give her a word for them.

Scientists wondered, "Did Genie have a normal learning capacity? Could a nurturing, enriched environment make up for Genie's horrible past? Would it be possible for Genie to recover completely?" This is how the "experiment" began.

A team of scientists (referred to as the Genie Team) began working with Genie. They wanted to find out what they could about how humans learn. Over 200 years ago, scientists had studied another "wild child" in France named Victor. They called that case "The Forbidden Experiment." Genie's case was similar because it would be unthinkable to lock up or put a child in such severe isolation on purpose.

But having discovered a child who had been isolated, scientists wanted to learn from that experience. Was that wrong? As with Victor, people wondered if scientists should be studying Genie. Could she be both studied and taken care of well? Or should the Genie research be forbidden?

Within several months Genie had a vocabulary of over one hundred words that she understood, though she was still very silent. Her talking was limited to short high-pitched squeaks that were hard to understand. The team of scientists discovered that Genie had been beaten for making noise. It was hard to know if her inability to talk was a result of living so long without interacting with other humans, being in an impoverished environment with little sensory stimulation, or because she had been abused.

Genie began to become emotionally attached to some of the scientists who spent time with her. One scientist made sure that he was there every morning when Genie woke up, for important events during the day, and to put her to bed each night, in order to build a sense of family. Some people thought that it was necessary to feel connected to other humans before one could learn to speak. After about six months, Genie lived in a foster home. The father of the family she lived with was the head of the Genie Team.

Genie continued to recover and develop. She ran, giggled, and smiled. People commented that in some ways she seemed like a normal 18-20-month-old child. If you were to give her a toy, she would feel it gently first with her fingertips. Then she would rub it against her mouth and face, using her lips to feel the object. Genie did not seem to know when to use her eyes and when to use her sense of touch.

Genie's scientist "friends" took her on daily outings—walks through the neighborhood, visits to stores. Genie was so curious and hungry for experiences. She would demand to know the names for all the things in stores, almost faster than she could be told. She would pick up items and intently explore them. Even strangers felt compelled to help her learn about the world. A butcher, who knew nothing about Genie, used to hand her an unwrapped bone, piece of meat or fish each time she passed by his shop. She would explore it by rubbing it on her lips and face. Other strangers would go out of their way to give Genie things. Somehow her thirst for learning about her world showed.

Many scientists came from all over to meet and observe Genie. They argued and debated about what research to do, as did the Genie Team itself. What could Genie best help scientists discover about learning? Could they conduct their research without interfering with her well- being?

Genie's vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds, but she was still not able to string words together into meaningful sentences. Normal children begin by learning to say simple sentences, like "No have toy." Soon they are able to say "I not have toy." Eventually they will learn to say, "I do not have the toy.' Later they will refine the sentence to say, "I don't have the toy." Genie seemed to be stuck at the first stage. We do learn many words from experience, from seeing, hearing, reading, and asking. But some scientists think that learning how to speak in sentences and sensing how words get put together in logical order also depends on something that is built into our brains from birth. Was Genie's brain missing something which was necessary for learning language?

Scientists began to wonder if Genie was mentally retarded. If she was, had she been mentally retarded from birth? Had she been injured? Or was the retardation a result of her brain being deprived of good nutrition and/or stimulation? How had her poor diet and isolated upbringing affected her growing brain?

Over the next couple of years, some scientists concluded that Genie was not mentally retarded, even though she was still unable to master language. She was brilliant at nonverbal communication. Sometimes she would be so frustrated at not being able to say what she wanted that she would grab a pencil and paper and in a few strokes, illustrate fairly complex ideas and even feelings. She scored the highest recorded score ever on tests that measure a person's ability to make sense out of chaos and to see patterns. Her abilities to understand and to think logically were also strong. She had a perfect score on an adult-level test that measured spatial abilities. One test required that she use a set of colored sticks to recreate a complicated structure from memory. She was not only able to build the structure perfectly, she built it with sticks of the exact same color as the first structure! Despite all this, Genie remained unable to master the basics of language.

Scientists wondered—-could she ever be taught to speak? If so, how would her brain have to grow and adapt to do so? Could a teenager still learn to talk or is the structure of language something that must be learned in the early years of life when the brain is growing and changing so much?

In most humans, both sides of the brain are involved in every task, but some tasks result in more electrical activity on the right side of the brain and some in more activity on the left side of the brain. Scientists noticed that Genie was particularly good, quick, and confident at those tasks that involved more of the right brain. She was hesitant at tasks that require equal coordination between the two sides of the brain. She failed at tasks that involved more of the left brain, such as language.

One of the last tests that was done on Genie measured what parts of her brain were active as she conducted different kinds of tasks. Scientists were shocked at how unbalanced the activity in her brain was. There was almost no left brain activity. Her tests looked similar to tests of children who had to have their left brains removed.

Some scientists thought this explained her inability to learn language. Whether this was correct or not, it raised the question: Why was her brain activity so lopsided? Does the left brain develop in those critical early years of life when Genie was so isolated? Does the left brain need to receive stimulation and hear language to develop?

After about five years of researching Genie's progress, the Genie Team lost their funding from the government agency that had awarded the research grant. The scientists at this agency felt that the Genie Team was not doing good scientific research because the tests Genie was being given were not producing enough new information. At the same time that these people felt that Genie wasn't being tested enough, others felt that Genie was being over- tested.

Genie's mother, encouraged by one of Genie's old teachers, tried to sue the Genie Team for "cruel" treatment of Genie. Their lawsuit claimed that Genie was exhausted by the testing and that the interests of science were being viewed as more important than Genie's personal development.

In the late 1970s Genie's mother forbid the Genie Team from having contact with Genie. Even though she at first lived again with her mother, her mother was unable to care for Genie herself, and Genie had to be sent to a series of foster homes.

In one of these homes she was again abused—this time punished for vomiting. Genie responded by not opening her mouth for several months. Genie began to deteriorate both physically and mentally. Genie's mother moved and placed Genie in a home for retarded adults. Genie is said to still live in a home for retarded adults. "Genie" is not her real name. It was first given to her by the scientists in an effort to protect her privacy. Now her privacy is guarded by her mother. She has no contact with any of the scientist who worked with her and come to love her. Several books have been written about her, and a television documentary program was also made about the story of Genie.

From Learning About Learning, a teacher's guide in the Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS) series from the Lawrence Hall of Science, copyright by The Regents of the University of California. There are more than 70 teacher's guides and handbooks in the GEMS series, available from GEMS, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, (510) 642-7771. Visit the LHS GEMS web site for more information. © LHS GEMS. May not be reproduced without permission.