Wild children and language
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Is language instinctive? Can children produce it on their own?
Legends, evil kings and emperors
- What language will children develop if they had never been exposed to
speech?
- The original human language?
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Herodotus: Egyptian king Psamtik I, 7 cen.BC (2 infants to a shepherd)
Akbar the Great, the Mogul emperor of India, XVI cent.
King James IV of Scotland (Hebrew?)
Attempts to reconstruct the language of Adam and Eve
- Wild children
- Deaf children
Victor: the wild boy of Aveyron
1800, Aveyron district of France
11-12 years old
Sicard, director of the Institute for
Deaf-Mutes in Paris, got custody
- strong similarities between the wild child and deaf children > however, no progress
– unteachable
Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, programme for social and language development
- sharpen boy’s perceptual abilities (match colours and shapes)
- learned to associate words to objects, could read and write to a significant extent
- mute until his death in 1828
- ‘Critical age’ for language learning!
Genie: raised in solitary confinement
1970s, USA
13 ½ years old – locked in small room by her father for 12 years
(fed, but never spoken to; beaten for producing sounds)
-had acquired language to a low level prior to confinement
-cognitive abilities: little more than those of a 2-year-old
-in few months acquired words for hundreds of objects
-developed well socially
-simple and ungrammatical speech (better understanding)
- not able to acquire normal level of language
Isabelle: confinement with a mute mother
1942, 6 ½ years of age
Helen: the famous deaf and blind girl
blind and deaf at the age of 19 months
Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio
- after 7 years, Anne Sullivan Macy – teach
language through the sense of touch
(recommended by Alexander Graham Bell)
Mason, Assistant Director of the Speech Clinic
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graduated from Harvard University with
honours and became acclaimed lecturer
and writer in the service of handicapped
people
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Wrote an autobiography: The Story of My
Life
locked in a room
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in less than 3 months –producing sentence
utterances
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after 20 months – from her first spoken
word to full length sentences
A critical age for first-language acquisition?
Three major factors influence language acquisition:
(1) the age at which the onset of non-exposure to language occurred;
(2) the duration of non-exposure to language;
(3) the extent of any physical, psychological and social trauma prior to being discovered and
taught language.
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critical age for first-language learning lies somewhere under Victor and Genie’s ages of 12
and 13 years, but above Isabelle and Helen’s ages of 6 and 7 years
Sign language, written language and the deaf
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Can language exist in the mind without speech?
How can a soundless language like sign language be acquired?
How can we judge whether persons who use ‘sign language’ truly have language?
- certain sign languages as American/ French/ British sign language can communicate in sign
whatever is expressed in speech (complex sentences: relative, conditional clauses etc.) and
the signer communicates at the same speed as a speaker does
- gestures: universal vs. culture specific (making beats)
- 2 types of sign language:
a) represent words through signs in the order as they appear
in ordinary languages (Swedish, English, French)
- spelling words with individual signs (1 and 2 handed)
- using whole signs for each word or morpheme
b) sign languages with their own words and grammatical
systems for the generation of sentences (Am./Br. sign language)
Up to 1970s sign language cannot be a genuine language?
Mentalism, language is a kind of knowledge in the mind that is related to but is independent
of its physical manifestation in speech
Taught in school
The ORAL approach (teaching of speech sounds + sign language to children with moderate
hearing loss > Total Communication, 1970s, US–sign language in the curriculum along with
speech training)
The WRITTEN LANGUAGE approach (associate words with objects, events and situations)