Genie the feral child

In 1970 the police found a thirteen year old girl locked in a dark and almost empty room in a house where she lived with her parent and an older brother. The room consisted of one crib where she slept and a potty chair which she was tied to most of the time. The girl is recognized by the name Genie to the public to keep her identity more private. Both parents were accused for child abuse but her dad committed suicide the day before going to court. Even though Genie was thirteen, she was the size of a six year old kid when she was found. She was malnourished and since she had not been able to move around her body was extremely weak and she could not walk properly. Also her father would beat her if she tried to speak or made any noise so she had learned to stay quiet. This meant that Genie was unable to speak and communicate. She was one of the mot extreme cases of child abuse which made her very interesting to psychologist and linguists. Researchers thought this was such a great opportunity that they set up a team of psychologists, linguistics, and teachers that would partially study Genie and partially help her recover. There had been a theory that children are only able to learn language during a specific period of time and when that time has passed it is too late. Genie would have passed this phase already so depending on if she could learn language or not she would either support the idea or maybe even prove it wrong. At the beginning Genie made great progress and she started to learn words and expand her vocabulary. It looked very promising and everybody thought that the theory would get proven wrong when Genie started to use words to describe emotions and events from the past. But then the progress stopped and she didn't move forwards anymore. She knew lots of words but she was unable to make any sentences and she could not understand grammar. There was a similar case in France during the 1800's when a twelve year old boy just came out of the forest one day. He was very hairy, ate things humans would not normally eat, he moved more like an animal than like a human and he had scars all over his body. All of this showed that he had been living in the woods for most of his life. His teacher failed in civilizing the boy, who they called Victor, and he was not able to learn language either. He only learned a bunch of words, just like Genie. Both these cases supports the theory that there is a deadline for learning language, even though you can learn how to produce words later. Another big question that the scientists had was that they wanted to know if Genie was retarded from birth or if the only cause for her slowed brain development was the extreme abuse and mistreatment. They did sleep studies (eeg) on her and the results were abnormal but they couldn't draw any conclusions from it.