Reddit reviews Genie: A Scientific Tragedy

Dude. First google result for Genie: A Scientific Tragedy.

I very rarely read non-fiction, but I'm reading Genie: A Scientific Tragedy at the moment.

I became interested in her story when we briefly covered feral children in sociology and she was mentioned. It's easy reading, though obviously a sad subject but I'm enjoying it.

This story just takes my breath away. I've read about Genie and worked with/read about children/adults (respectively) who, due to being born deaf in countries where attitudes about special ed are vastly different, had no concept of language whatsoever. I hope that this girl is able to develop a successful means of communication, whether that be PECS, some form of signing, speech, or some combination thereof. Life is so much more difficult for those without a means to effectively communicate.

I had a fascination with feral children a while ago after hearing the story of a girl they found that had been neglected/abused in total isolation for 13 years. She was never taught to walk or talk. She had no appreciable human contact. A terrible thing for sure, luckily she was found and rescued, her being a minor they couldn't release her real identity so they gave her the nickname Genie. However unfortunate the circumstances of how she was raised, it does give science a rare chance to learn about how our brains are pre-wired to develop language, the critical periods in human development where language can be learned and when it decays, etc. She was never able to learn to string together more than 2-3 word sentences as too much damage had been done from neglect during those crucial years. Very sad story.

Be prepared for some heavy reading as all three sources are straight out of academia. Was certainly over my head at times but learned a lot trying to!

http://ling.umd.edu/~omaki/teaching/Ling240_Winter09/Curtiss1974_genie.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Genie-Scientific-Tragedy-Russ-Rymer/dp/0060924659/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1458789961&sr=8-2&keywords=genie+linguistic

http://www.amazon.com/Genie-Psycholinguistic-Perspectives-neurolinguistics-psycholinguistics/dp/0121963500/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458789961&sr=8-1&keywords=genie+linguistic

More information:

Movie about her: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273822/

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Genie-Scientific-Tragedy-Russ-Rymer/dp/0060924659/

Video (Secret of the Wild Child): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEnkY2iaKis

Further Reading:

The Forbidden Experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments

The Critical Period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period