CLA

• The story of Genie Wiley came to light


  November 4, 1970
• Genie Wiley's rehabilitation team

  • Graduate student Susan Curtiss
  • Psychologist James Kent
• Genie Wiley spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated and abused for over a decade
• Genie's case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test
• Genie was tied naked to her potty chair, only able to move her hands and feet
• Genie's father would beat her when she made noise
• Genie's father, mother, and older brother rarely spoke to her
• Genie's father interacted with her by barking or growling
• Despite initially scoring at the level of a 1-year-old, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary
• Genie started by learning single words and eventually began putting two words together
• Susan Curtiss believed Genie would be fully capable of acquiring language
• Genie's language abilities remained stuck at a certain stage where she appeared unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way
• The Forbidden Experiment: 'Isolating a child from human contact is unethical and illegal to carry out'
• Genie's inability to use grammar after puberty supports the critical period hypothesis and the nurture argument
• The study on Zebra Finches by Ofer Tchernichovski in 1999 looked at imitation and whether language/vocalisations are innate or learned in birds
• Zebra Finches study details

  1. Explored how songs between different colonies varied

  2. Investigated whether vocal learning has a strong genetic component

  3. Some birds kept with their own parents, some with foster parents

  4. Isolated from teacher to see if they could pick up singing
• Imitation varied across the families of Zebra Finches
• Imitation in Zebra Finches needs an MKO (More Knowledgeable Other), parent, or role model
• The first generation of Zebra Finches didn't sound as they should because they weren't taught
• The study on Zebra Finches supports the nurture argument as per Skinner's theory of imitation and MKO
• The Berko and Brown 'Fis' phenomenon was studied


  1960
• The 'Fis' phenomenon demonstrates that perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability of the child to produce those phonemes
• Linguistic comprehension skills usually come before linguistic production skills in child language acquisition
• The fis study shows that phoneme perception occurs before the child's capacity to generate the proper allophone
• Children have more phonological processes in their speech than adults, determining which processes to allow and suppress is part of learning a language
• Jean Berko conducted the Wug test


  1958
• In the Wug test, a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them
• The Wug test demonstrates that even young children show knowledge of linguistic morphology
• The purpose of the Wug test was to investigate how children learn language
• Jean Berko: 'Wug test - 1958'
• Wug test


  1. A child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them

  2. Used to demonstrate that even young children show knowledge of linguistic morphology

  3. Instrument developed to allow the investigation of how the plural and inflectional morphemes are acquired in a certain language

  4. Even very young children have already internalised systematic aspects of the linguistic language that enables them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words
• Learning a language


  Determines which processes to allow and which to suppress
• Hart and Risley study - 1995


  1. Recorded all interactions between caregivers and children from age 7 months - 3 years old in different socioeconomic classes for 1 hour per week

  2. Established a scientifically substantiated link between children’s early family experiences and their intellectual growth

  3. Found staggering contrasts in the extremes of advantage and within the middle class in the amount of interaction between parents and children which lead to striking disparities in the children’s later vocabulary growth rate
• Kaluli tribe of Papau New Guinea: '1983'
• Kaluli tribe study


  1. Children aren’t spoken to using CDS until they are able to talk since then they are worthy of being in the tribe

  2. Stimulus was listening to the other people in the tribe speak

  3. Despite this, there wasn’t an impact on their language acquisition

  4. CDS isn’t a crucial factor in language acquisition, implying that Bruner’s interaction theory isn’t true
• Isabelle
• Discovered in Ohio in 1930s
• Age when discovered: six and a half years
• Lived her entire life in a dark attic with her deaf mute mother
• Initially thought to be deaf like her mother, but started speaking after receiving training