Module 4.1

Language Acquisition under extreme circumstances

We can also learn about how children acquire language by looking at cases where the child has acquired - or not acquired - a language under unusual and extreme conditions. One example would be 'les enfants sauvages'. An early case is that of 'Wild Peter', who was discovered in Germany in 1724. He eventually came over to live in England, first of all at the court of George I, and was examined by Dr Arbuthnot. It was decided to teach him how to speak English - but the results were not particularly convincing.

Other cases have been similar - for instance, that of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (see a summary of his story - and that of other feral children here, written by science journalist John McCrone ) and, most recently, Genie, an American girl who spent the first twelve years of her life shut up in a small room with only the most restricted human contact - the script of an American television programme about Genie can be found here. None of these children ever achieved full linguistic fluency, mastering at best a small number of words, and having little or no capacity to sequence them grammatically.

The evidence from these is ambiguous and difficult to interpret ; although it has been claimed that it offers backing for a modular view of language such as that of Chomsky, McCrone argues that, on the contrary, these cases demonstrate that fully human intelligence cannot be realised without the symbolic thinking-power that language provides.

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