Review: Genie: A Scientific Tragedy

Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, Blade Runner 2049 came out so I wanted to revisit the 1982 film Blade Runner and that made me wonder what else actress Sean Young had done, so that led me to the 2001 film Mockingbird Don't Sing where she played the role of Dr. Judy Bingham. Note a noteworthy movie, but it made me interested in the real-world case of the true story of Genie, a modern-day feral child forced into that state by forced isolation, starvation, and neglect from her dysfunctional parents. Genie entered into institutional care and government protection the year I was born -- 1970. Despite the documented history of missteps taken with similarly traumatized children, this one suffered much of the same as a football fought over by careerists, further abuse in foster care, and eventually defaulted back to the mother that failed her for her childhood. From being cast into a metaphorical oubliette from her family, she was forgotten and cast away through effective neglect by the state.

While the undeserved tribulations are moving, intellectually fascinating in this study is what this highly studied child can suggest about language because of the unique circumstances of this unfortunate "natural experiment." Susan Curtiss began her work on Genie's case as a graduate student in linguistics. Her analysis turned the concept of The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) -- a hypothetical module of the human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition first proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s – on its head. Rather than the brain organizing language acquisition, language acquisition organized the brain. Curtiss explained that “Genie's case suggests the possibility that normal cerebral organization may depend on language development occurring at the appropriate time.” As this author summarizes: "If Genie was any indication, we a physically formed by the influence of language. An essential part of our personal physical development is conferred on us by others, and comes in at the ear. The organization of our brain is as genetically ordained and as automatic as breathing, but, like breathing, it is initiated by the slap of a midwife, and the midwife is grammar.” (pages 169 - 170) This leads to such questions explored as “What is a language?” Is American Sign Language one? Apparently yes due to the way it evolves by the way its users grow it and it is a tool for additional studies. This included a deaf boy that learned ASL with flawed grammar but "developed proper ASL from the flawed model" suggesting the syntactic tooling came online from an innate source (p. 174). Fascinating stuff.

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