As an English teacher, this is the sort of question I should be answering, but I am drawing a blank.
I was over with the Brits today and one said that children raised by animals cannot learn to speak or use language properly. He went on and on about how a mental window closes at some point and after that the use of language can never be proficient and natural.
I recently read Why Michael Couldn’t Hit by neurologist Dr Harold L. Klawans. The book is about the neurology of sport and how we imprint certain abilities at specific ages. He mentions speech formation and says that if we do not learn to verbalise our thoughts by puberty, although we may learn to understand language, we can never learn to speak. He cites the wolf boy and other cases of children with disturbed parents.
There was a classic case in sociology/psychology where a girl was kept locked up by her parents and rarely spoken to (anyone remember her name?). She was rescued as a teen but she never learned to speak much at all after that. She learned a few words with great effort but that was it. The language window in her brain closed before she could learn it.
Your British friend had almost certainly been watching BodyShock: Feral Children which was shown on British TV about 10 days ago.
The documentary mentioned the case of Genie who was discovered in 1970 at the age of 13 and who never learned to speak properly despite the attention of therapists and psychologists (she learned plenty of words, but not grammar).
Also mentioned was Oxana, discovered at the age of eight, having spent most of her life in the company of dogs. She was shown as a teenager, being reunited with her father and sister. She could communicate reasonably effectively, although she was clearly sub-normal from an educational perspective.
On the other hand, a young boy featured on the program who had apparently interacted almost exclusively with dogs between the ages of 3 and 5 was shown (now aged about six), and seemed relatively normal.
There does seem to be a window of opportunity as far as language learning is concerned.
Wasn’t there some debate about whether she struggled to learn because she wasn’t spoken to early on, or if she never learned because she was she had some sort of learning disability?
Her mother said that prior to be locked up at the age of 20 months by her schizophrenic father, she had already begun learning to speak single words so clearly she was not retarded. However in the intervening 11 years she lost whatever speech she had developed and though able to comprehend speech she could not learn to form it. She managed to do better than Victor (the wolf boy) apparently although that case is not as well documented.
Feral children are almost certainly malnourished to some degree, and may have suffered irreparable mental damage as a result. As well, it is likely that the majority of feral children are the result of abandonment for some reason, rather than lucky survivors of a shipwreck or plane crash. Such abandonment could be because the child is handicapped in some way and rejected by the parents. These would suggest that there may be some pre-selection for feral children to be mental “sub-normal” in ways not related to their lack of language instruction.
Fairly obviously, documented cases of otherwise “normal” people who never learned languages are pretty rare. Even Helen Keller, who had to basically invent her own language, learned to talk before she became deaf and blind (or “DeafBlind” as some would have it). Even author Prof. Steven Pinker, who asserts that language is an innate capability of humans, doesn’t have a lot of cites to offer in this case. However, he does offer evidence that people who learn a language later in life (than early childhood) rarely attain the same fluency as people who do. On the other hand, I personally know two non-native Japanese speakers who speak the language well enough to fool native speakers on the phone, and both of them learned the language in their early 20’s.
I’d contend that there is insufficient evidence so far to say whether or not the inability to achieve fluency in cases of feral children is determined by their lack of exposure to language at a sufficiently early age.
There have been a number of cases of feral children in India. In particular, I remember reading about two young girls who were found being raised by a wolf or tiger or something like that. One of the girls never learned to speak, and the other only developed a very rudimentary vocabulary.
I would reason that if a child was locked up very soon after birth, they would lose the ability to use language effectively. We are all born with the ability to distinguish between many phonetic sounds; however, we quickly lose the ability to recognize (and reproduce) those sounds that we do not hear spoken around us. This is why native Japanese speakers learning English cannot hear the difference between “L” and “R.” Also, I imagine if most of us visited the !Kung San in Africa, their nuanced language of tongue-clicks would sound like jibberish to us. So, in sum, if an infant was never exposed to any human language, they would lose the ability to hear and reproduce most of it.
The way I think of feral children’s use of language is similar to chimps (wow, that comparison sounds offensive, but it’s really not meant to be). We have taught chimps to communicate and for quite a while we thought they were truly understanding language. However, current research suggests they are not really understanding language, but are responding in more of a behavioral-conditioning manner. I would assume that a child who was hearing and using language for the first time at, say, adolescence would exhibit a similar pattern.
One of her caretakers performed EEG tests which he claimed conclusively demonstrated that she was mentally retarded. Another of her caretakers claimed, just as conclusively, that her IQ test performances improved steadily once she was “rescued” which they could not have done had she been retarded. There’s still a lot of emotion wrapped up in the case (Russ Rymer’s book “Genie” gives the details) and the truth will likely never be known to everyone’s satisfaction.
Your knowledge of phenome extinction is correct, but your Japanese example is not. The Japanese use both the “r” and the “l” phenomes, or sounds quite like them. However, they use them interchangably in most words, the way Americans use “d” and “t” interchangeably in many words. (Say “ladder” and “later”. If you’re not thinking about it, you said the same sounds twice. If you’re American, that is!)
Cerowyn, as you point out, fluency in a second language is possible to achieve. What we’re wondering (and I have no new answers) is if acquiring a first language is possible if it’s not done in infancy and toddlerhood.
It does *seem *that hearing (or seeing, or feeling) language early is a requirement for having any sort of fluency at all. But testing this theory would be an ethical nightmare, of course! Even examining feral children doesn’t really help - we don’t know if they would have been “normal” anyway, and we don’t know when they were abandoned, and if they were old enough to have been exposed to language first.
Helen Keller was 19 months old before she became blind and deaf - she had plenty of time for early language acquisition, whether or not she actually spoke English. (Most 19 month olds have a spoken vocabulary of 5-20 words, and understand thousands more. cite. ) It’s probably because of this that she even had the concept of developing her own signs with her family (which she did - over 50 of them. The “wild animal” we saw in the movie wasn’t entirely so wild IRL). When Anne Sullivan stepped in, it was a matter of teaching her a *third *language - fingerspelling, not really giving her language from scratch.
In The Language Instinct, Pinker does discuss this situation at length: he concludes that if you don’t learn a language in a certain time period, you’ll never achieve fluency in any language. I don’t have the book handy, or I’d point to a page number, but he does discuss just this question.
I do happen to have the book handy, and indeed flipped through it before I posted above. Chapter 9, “Baby Born Talking - Describes Heaven” describes the process by which language skills are thought to develop. On page 277 of my copy (first HarperPerennial Edition, 1995), he starts:
Near the bottom of the page, he concludes his observations by stating: