Genie (feral child)

Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California.

Psychologists, linguists, and other scientists almost immediately focused a great deal of attention on Genie's case. Upon determining that she had not yet learned language, linguists saw her as providing an opportunity to gain further insight into the processes controlling language acquisition skills and to test theories and hypotheses identifying critical periods during which humans learn to understand and use language. Throughout the time scientists studied Genie, she made substantial advances in her overall mental and psychological development. Within months, she developed exceptional nonverbal communication skills and gradually learned some basic social skills, but even by the end of their case study, she still exhibited many behavioral traits characteristic of an unsocialized person. She also continued to learn and use new language skills throughout the time they tested her, but ultimately remained unable to fully acquire a first language.

Authorities initially arranged for Genie's admission to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where a team of physicians and psychologists managed her care for several months. Her subsequent living arrangements became the subject of rancorous debate. In June 1971, she left the hospital to live with her teacher from it, but a month and a half later, authorities placed her with the family of the scientist heading the research team, with whom she lived for almost four years. Soon after turning 18, she returned to live with her mother, who decided after a few months that she could not adequately care for her. Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions for disabled adults, and the people running it cut her off from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse. As a result, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated, and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.

In early January 1978, Genie's mother abruptly forbade all scientific observations and testing of her. Little is known about her circumstances since then. Her current whereabouts are uncertain, although as of 2016 she was believed to be living in the care of the state of California. Psychologists and linguists continue to discuss her, and there is considerable academic and media interest in her development and the research team's methods. In particular, scientists have compared her to Victor of Aveyron, a 19th-century French child who was also the subject of a case study in delayed psychological development and late language acquisition.

Family background

Genie was the last, and also second surviving, of four children born to parents living in Arcadia, California. Her father worked in a factory as a flight mechanic during World War II and continued in aviation afterward, and her mother, who was around 20 years younger and from an Oklahoma farming family, had come to southern California as a teenager with family friends fleeing the Dust Bowl. During her early childhood, Genie's mother sustained a severe head injury in an accident, giving her lingering neurological damage that caused degenerative vision problems in one eye. Genie's father mostly grew up in orphanages in the American Pacific Northwest. His father died of a lightning strike, and his mother ran a brothel while only infrequently seeing him. Additionally, his mother gave him a feminine first name which made him the target of constant derision. As a result, he harbored extreme resentment toward his mother during childhood, which Genie's brother and the scientists who studied her believed was the root cause of his subsequent anger problems.

When Genie's father reached adulthood he changed his first name to one which was more typically masculine, and his mother began to spend as much time with him as she could. He became almost singularly fixated on his mother, despite having relentless arguments over her attempts to convince him to adopt a less rigid lifestyle, and therefore came to treat all other relationships as secondary at best. Although Genie's parents initially seemed happy to those who knew them, soon after they married he prevented her from leaving home and beat her with increasing frequency and severity. Her eyesight steadily deteriorated due to lingering effects from her existing neurological damage, the onset of severe cataracts, and a detached retina in one eye, leaving her progressively more dependent on him.

Genie's father disliked children and wanted none of his own, finding them noisy, but around five years into their marriage his wife became pregnant. Although he beat her throughout the pregnancy, and near the end attempted to strangle her to death, she gave birth to an apparently healthy daughter. Her father found her crying disturbing and placed her in the garage, where she caught pneumonia and died at the age of ten weeks. Their second child, born approximately a year later, was a boy diagnosed with Rh incompatibility who died at two days of age, either from complications of that or from choking on his own mucus. Three years later they had another son, who doctors described as healthy despite also having Rh incompatibility. His father forced his wife to keep him quiet, causing significant physical and linguistic developmental delays. When he reached the age of four his paternal grandmother grew concerned about his development and took over his care for several months, and he made good progress with her before she eventually returned him to his parents.

Early life

Genie was born about five years after her brother, around the time that her father began to isolate himself and his family from all other people. Her birth was a standard Caesarean section with no noted complications, and she was in the 50th percentile for weight. The following day she showed signs of Rh incompatibility and required a blood transfusion, but had no sequelae and was otherwise described as healthy. A medical appointment at three months showed that she was gaining weight normally but found a congenital hip dislocation, which required her to wear a highly restrictive Frejka splint from the age of to 11 months. It caused her to be late to walk, and researchers believed this led her father to start speculating that she was mentally retarded. As a result, he made a concentrated effort not to talk to or pay attention to her, and strongly discouraged her mother and brother from doing so as well.

There is little information about Genie's early life, but available records indicate that for her first months she displayed relatively normal development. Her mother later recalled that she was not a cuddly baby, did not babble much, and resisted solid food. At times she said that at some unspecified point Genie spoke individual words, although she could not recall them, but at other times she said that Genie had never produced speech of any kind. Researchers never determined which was the truth.

At the age of 11 months, Genie was still in overall good health and had no noted mental abnormalities, but had fallen to the 11th percentile for weight. The people who later studied her believed this was a sign that she was starting to suffer some degree of malnutrition. When she was 14 months old she came down with a fever and pneumonitis, and her parents took her to a pediatrician who had not previously seen her. The pediatrician said that, although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded and that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present, further amplifying her father's conclusion that she was severely retarded.

Six months later, when Genie was 20 months old, her paternal grandmother was killed in a hit-and-run traffic accident. Her death affected Genie's father far beyond normal levels of grief, and because his son had been walking with her he held him responsible, further heightening his anger. When the truck's driver received only a probationary sentence for both manslaughter and drunk driving, Genie's father became delusional with rage. Scientists believed these events made him feel society had failed him and convinced him he would need to protect his family from the outside world, but in doing so he lacked the self-awareness to recognize the destruction his actions caused. Because he believed Genie was severely retarded he thought she needed him to protect her even further, and therefore decided to hide her existence as much as possible. He immediately quit his job and moved his family into his mother's two-bedroom house, where he demanded her car and bedroom be left completely untouched as shrines to her, and further isolated his family.

Childhood

Upon moving, Genie's father increasingly confined her to the second bedroom in the back of the house while the rest of the family slept in the living room. During the daytime, for approximately 13 hours, he tied her to a child's toilet in a makeshift harness, which he forced her mother to make. It was designed to function as a straitjacket, and while in it she wore nothing but a diaper and could only move her extremities. At night, he usually tied her into a sleeping bag and placed her in a crib with a metal-screen cover, keeping her arms and legs immobilized, and researchers believed that he sometimes left her on the child's toilet overnight. When the family first moved into the house he sometimes allowed her to be in the backyard inside a small playpen, but she reportedly angered him by breaking it down to get out; the people who later worked with her believed this meant she was left alone in it for extended periods of time. He soon decided not to allow her outside at all, and kept her entirely confined in the bedroom.

Researchers concluded that, if Genie vocalized or made any other noise, her father would beat her with a large plank that he kept in her room. To keep her quiet he bared his teeth and growled like a dog at her, and he grew his fingernails out to scratch her. If he suspected her of doing something he did not like, he made these noises outside the door and beat her if he believed she had continued to do it, instilling in her an intense and persistent fear of cats and dogs. No one definitively discerned the exact reason for his dog-like behavior, although at least one scientist speculated he may have viewed himself as a guard dog and was acting out the role. As a result, she learned to make as little sound as possible and to otherwise give no outward expressions. She developed a tendency to masturbate in socially inappropriate contexts, leading doctors to consider the possibility that her father had sexually abused her or forced her brother to do so, although they never uncovered definite evidence.

Genie's father fed her as little as possible and refused to give her solid food, feeding her only baby food, cereal, Pablum, an occasional soft-boiled egg, and liquids. He, or when coerced, her brother, spooned food into her mouth as quickly as possible, and if she choked or could not swallow fast enough the person feeding her rubbed her face in her food. These were normally the only times he allowed her mother to be with her, although she could not feed her herself. She claimed her husband always fed Genie three times a day but also said that she sometimes risked a beating by making noise when hungry, leading researchers to believe he often refused to feed her. In early 1972 her mother told researchers that, whenever possible, at around 11:00 at night she would surreptitiously try to give her additional food, causing her to develop an abnormal sleep pattern in which she slept from 7 to 11pm, woke up for a few minutes, and fell back asleep for an additional hours. This sleep pattern continued for several months after she began to receive medical attention, and only gradually normalized.

Genie's father had an extremely low tolerance for noise, to the point of refusing to have a working television or radio in the house. He almost never allowed her mother or brother to talk and viciously beat them if they did so without permission, particularly forbidding them to speak to or around her. Any conversation between them was therefore very quiet and out of her earshot, preventing her from hearing any meaningful amount of language. Genie's father kept her room extremely dark, and the only available stimuli were the crib, the child's toilet, curtains on each of the windows, three pieces of furniture, and two plastic raincoats hanging on the closet door. On rare occasions he allowed her to play with plastic food containers, old spools of thread, ''TV Guide'' issues with many of the illustrations cut out, and the raincoats. The room had two almost entirely blacked-out windows, one which he left slightly open; although the house was well away from the street and other houses, she could see the side of a neighboring one and a few inches of sky, and occasionally heard environmental sounds or a neighboring child practicing the piano.

Throughout this time, Genie's father almost never permitted anyone else to leave the house, only allowing her brother to go to and from school and requiring him to prove his identity through various means before entering, and to discourage disobedience he frequently sat in the living room with a shotgun in his lap. He did not allow anyone else in or near the house, turned on the outside lights all night to discourage anyone from approaching, and kept his gun nearby in case someone did come. No one in the neighborhood knew about the abuse Genie's father carried out on his family or was aware that her parents ever had a child besides her brother. Throughout this time, her father kept detailed notes chronicling his mistreatment of his family and his efforts to conceal it.

Genie's mother was passive by nature and was almost completely blind throughout this time. Her husband continued to beat her and threatened to kill her if she attempted to contact her parents, close friends who lived nearby, or the police. He also prevented his son from seeking help and beat him with increasing frequency and severity; as he got older, his father forced him to carry out more abuse of Genie. He tried several times to run away. Genie's father was convinced that she would die by age 12 and promised that, if she survived past that age, he would allow her mother to seek outside assistance for her, but he reneged when Genie turned 12; her mother took no action for another year and a half.

Rescue

In October 1970, when Genie was approximately 13 years and 6 months old, her parents had a violent argument in which her mother threatened to walk out if she could not call her own parents. Her husband eventually relented, and later that day she left with Genie when he was out of the house to go to her parents' house in Monterey Park; Genie's brother, by then 18, had already run away from home and was living with friends. Around three weeks later, on November 4, their mother decided to apply for disability benefits for the blind in nearby Temple City, California, and brought Genie with her, but on account of her near-blindness, she accidentally entered the general social services office next door. The social worker who greeted them instantly sensed something was wrong when she saw Genie, and was shocked to learn her true age, having estimated from her appearance and demeanor that she was around six or seven and possibly autistic, and after she and her supervisor questioned Genie's mother and confirmed Genie's age they immediately contacted the police. Her parents were arrested and she became a ward of the court, and due to her physical condition and near-total unsocialized state, a court order was immediately issued for her to be taken to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Upon Genie's admission to the hospital, David Rigler, a therapist and University of Southern California psychology professor who was the chief psychologist at the hospital, and Howard Hansen, then the head of the psychiatry division and an early expert on child abuse, took direct control of Genie's care. The following day they assigned physician James Kent, another early advocate for child abuse awareness, to conduct the first examinations of her. Most of the information doctors received on Genie's early life came from the police investigation into her parents. Even after its conclusion, there were a large number of unresolved questions about her childhood that subsequent research never answered.

News of Genie reached major media outlets on November 17, receiving a great deal of local and national attention, and the one photograph authorities released of her significantly fueled public interest in her. Although her father refused to speak to police or the media, large crowds subsequently went to try to see him, which he reportedly found extremely difficult to handle. On November 20, the morning before a scheduled court appearance on child abuse charges, he committed suicide by gunshot. Police found two suicide notes, one intended for his son, which in part said, "Be a good boy, I love you," and one directed at police. One note—sources conflict as to which—contained the declaration, "The world will never understand."

After Genie's father committed suicide, authorities and hospital staff exclusively focused on her and her mother; years later her brother said their mother soon began dedicating all of her love and attention to Genie, after which he left the Los Angeles area. At the request of Hansen, attorney John Miner, an acquaintance of his, represented their mother in court. She told the court that the beatings from her husband and her near-total blindness had left her unable to protect them. Charges against her were dropped, and she received counseling from the hospital; Hansen was her therapist's direct supervisor.

Characteristics and personality

James Kent stated that his initial examinations of Genie revealed by far the most severe case of child abuse he would ever encounter, and came away extremely pessimistic about her prognosis. She was extremely pale and grossly malnourished, standing tall and weighing only . She had two nearly full sets of teeth in her mouth and a distended abdomen. The restraining harness her father used had caused a thick callus and heavy black bruising on her buttocks, which took several weeks to heal. A series of X-rays found that she had moderate coxa valga in both hips and an undersized rib cage, and her bone age was that of an 11-year-old. Despite early tests confirming she had normal vision in both eyes, she could not focus them on anything more than away, corresponding to the dimensions of the room her father kept her in.

Genie's gross motor skills were extremely weak; she could neither stand up straight nor fully straighten any of her limbs, and she had very little endurance. Her movements were very hesitant and unsteady, and she had a characteristic "bunny walk", in which she held her hands in front of her like claws while ambulating, which suggested extreme difficulty with sensory processing and an inability to integrate visual and tactile information. Kent was somewhat surprised to find her fine motor skills were significantly better, determining they were at approximately the level of a two-year-old. She could not chew and had very severe dysphagia—incapable of swallowing solid or even soft food, and barely able to do so with liquids. When eating, she held anything she could not swallow in her mouth until her saliva broke it down, and if this took too long, she spat it out and mashed it with her fingers. She was also completely incontinent, and did not respond to extreme temperatures.

Doctors found it very difficult to test or estimate Genie's mental age or any of her cognitive abilities, but on two attempts they found she scored at the level of a 13-month-old. To the surprise of doctors she was intensely interested in exploring new environmental stimuli, although objects seemed to intrigue her much more than people. She seemed especially curious about unfamiliar sounds, and Kent noted that she very intently searched for their sources. Doctors noticed her extreme fear of cats and dogs very early during her stay, but initially thought this was due to her being incapable of rational thinking; they did not discern its actual origin until years later.

From the start Genie showed interest in many hospital staff members, often approaching and walking with complete strangers, but Kent said she did not seem to distinguish between people and showed no signs of attachment to anybody, including her mother and brother. At first she would not allow anyone to touch her, quickly shying away from any physical contact, and while she sat on her mother's lap when requested she remained very tense and got up as quickly as possible; hospital staff wrote that her mother seemed entirely oblivious to her emotions and actions. Her behavior was typically highly antisocial and proved extremely difficult for others to control. Regardless of where she was she constantly salivated and spat, and continually sniffed and blew her nose on anything that happened to be nearby. She had no sense of personal property, frequently pointing to or taking something she wanted from someone else, or situational awareness. Doctors wrote that she acted on impulse irrespective of the setting, especially noting that she frequently engaged in open masturbation and would sometimes attempt to involve older men in it.

From the start Genie showed a small amount of responsiveness to nonverbal information, including gestures and facial expressions from other people, and made reasonably good eye contact. However, her own demeanor was completely devoid of any facial expressions or discernible body language, and she could only nonverbally get across a few very basic needs. She clearly distinguished speaking from other sounds but remained almost completely silent and unresponsive to speech, and any responses she gave were to accompanying nonverbal signals. When upset she would wildly attack herself, and while doing so she remained completely expressionless and never cried or vocalized; some accounts said she could not cry at all. To make noise, she would push chairs or other similar objects. Her outbursts initially occurred very often and had no discernible trigger—Kent wrote that she never tried to indicate the source of her anger—and continued until someone diverted her attention or she physically tired herself out, at which point she would again become silent and non-expressive.

Linguists later discerned that, in January 1971, Genie's receptive vocabulary only consisted of her own name, the names of a few other familiar people, and about 15–20 individual words for names of objects, and her active vocabulary consisted of two phrases, "stop it" and "no more", both of which she treated as individual words. They could not determine the extent of her receptive or active vocabulary at any point before January 1971, and therefore did not know whether she had acquired any or all of these words during the preceding two months. After observing her for some time they concluded that she was not selectively mute, and tests found no physiological or psychological explanation for her lack of language. Because her existing medical records also contained no clear indications of mental disabilities researchers determined that, due to her extreme isolation and lack of exposure to language during childhood, she had not acquired a first language.

Preliminary assessment

Within a month after Genie's admission to the hospital, Jay Shurley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist in extreme social isolation, took an interest in her case. Shurley noted that it was the most severe one of isolation he had ever studied or heard about, which he maintained more than 20 years later. Over the next year and a half he came on three three-day visits to conduct daily observations and to carry out a sleep study, hoping to determine if Genie was autistic, whether or not she had sustained any brain damage, and whether or not she was born mentally retarded. Shurley concluded she was not autistic, with which other doctors who worked with during that time and later researchers concurred; he noted that she had a high level of emotional disturbance, but wrote that her eagerness for new stimuli and lack of behavioral defense mechanisms were uncharacteristic of autism.

Shurley found no signs of brain damage but observed a few persistent abnormalities in Genie's sleep, including a significantly reduced amount of REM sleep with a much larger than average variance in duration, and an unusually high number of sleep spindles (bursts of rhythmic or repetitive neural activity). He eventually concluded she had been mentally retarded from birth, specifically citing her significantly elevated number of sleep spindles, as these are characteristic of people born severely retarded. The other scientists following the case remained divided on this issue. Much later, for example, Curtiss emphatically argued that, though Genie clearly had serious emotional difficulties, she could not have been retarded. She pointed out that Genie made a year's developmental progress for every calendar year after her rescue, which would not be expected if her condition was congenital, and that some aspects of language she acquired were very unusual in the speech of mentally retarded people. Curtiss instead maintained that she was born with at least average intelligence and that the abuse and isolation of her childhood had left her functionally retarded.

Hospital stay

In his first meeting with Genie, James Kent initially observed no reactions from her but eventually drew a small amount of nonverbal and verbal responsiveness with a small puppet. Playing with this and similar puppets quickly became her favorite activity and, apart from her tantrums, accounted for most of the few times she expressed any emotion during the early part of her stay. Within a few days she started learning to dress herself and began voluntarily using the toilet, but she continued to suffer from nighttime and daytime incontinence which only slowly improved. Kent quickly realized there would be a large number of people working with her, and was concerned that she would not learn to form a normal relationship unless somebody was a steady presence in her life, so he decided to accompany her on walks and to all of her appointments.

Genie quickly began growing and putting on weight, and steadily became more confident in her movements. By December, she had good eye–hand coordination and was much better at focusing her eyes. She rapidly developed a sense of possession; for reasons doctors did not determine she would hoard objects to which she took a liking, and became extremely upset if someone touched or moved anything she collected. She took all kinds of items but particularly sought colorful plastic objects, which doctors speculated was due to these having been the items she had access to as a child, and she did not seem to care whether they were toys or ordinary containers but especially sought out beach pails. During the first few months of her stay, giving her one of these objects could bring her out of a tantrum.

After a few weeks Genie became much more responsive to other people, and shortly afterward began paying attention to people speaking, but at first she remained mostly unexpressive and it was unclear whether she responded more to verbal or nonverbal stimuli. Shortly afterwards she showed clear responses to nonverbal signals, and her nonverbal communication skills quickly became exceptional. A month into her stay she started becoming sociable with familiar adults, first with Kent and soon after with other hospital staff. She was clearly happy when someone she knew visited and sometimes worked very hard to get a person to stay, expressing disappointment if she failed; for no discernible reason, her greetings were far more energetic than her relatively mild unhappiness when people left. After the state dropped charges against her mother she began visiting her twice a week, and over the course of a few months they steadily grew better at interacting with each other.

Around the same time doctors noted that Genie took pleasure in intentionally dropping or destroying small objects, and enjoyed watching someone else do the same to something she had been playing with. Kent wrote that she did the same series of actions several times over and that it appeared to ease some internal tension for her, and therefore thought she did this to gain control of traumatic childhood experiences. She also showed a deep fascination with classical piano music played in front of her, which researchers believed was because she could hear some piano music during her childhood. They noted that she did not have the same reaction to recordings, and if someone played anything other than classical music she would change the sheet music to a book which she knew had pieces she liked.

By December 1970, Kent and the other hospital staff working with Genie saw her as a potential case study subject. That month David Rigler obtained a small grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to do preliminary studies on her, and began organizing a research team to submit a larger request. In January 1971 doctors administered a Gesell Developmental Evaluation and found her to be at the developmental level of a 1-to-3-year-old, noting she already showed substantial developmental disparities. The following month psychologists Jack Block and Jeanne Block evaluated her, and found her scores ranged from below a 2-to-3-year-old level to, on a few components, a normal 12-to-13-year-old level. Around the same time, doctors noted that she was very interested in people speaking and that she attempted to mimic some speech sounds.

By April and May 1971, Genie's scores on the Leiter International Performance Scale tests had dramatically increased, with her overall mental age at the level of a typical 4-year-9-month-old, but on individual components she still showed a very high level of scatter. Her progress with language accelerated, and doctors noticed that the words she used indicated a fairly advanced mental categorization of objects and situations and focused on objective properties to a degree not normally found in children. Around that time, when a minor earthquake struck Los Angeles, she ran frightened into the kitchen and rapidly verbalized to some of the cooks she had befriended, marking the first time she sought out comfort from another person and the first time she was so readily verbal. However, she still had a hard time being with large crowds of people; at her birthday party, she became so anxious at all the guests present that she had to go outside with Rigler to calm down.

During the later part of Genie's stay at the hospital, she also started engaging in physical play with adults, and eventually began to enjoy giving and receiving hugs. She continued to exhibit frustration and have tantrums, but in response to situations that would have elicited similar reactions in most young children, and she could sulk for a long time despite receiving an object she liked. In April 1971, to the great surprise of doctors, she began attacking another girl because she felt she owned the hospital dress the other girl had on. This was the first time she showed a sense of possession over items she thought belonged to her but was otherwise impartial towards, and marked the first time she directed her anger outwards, although she did not entirely stop harming herself when upset.

Brain testing

Beginning in January 1971 scientists conducted a series of neurolinguistic tests on Genie to determine and monitor the course and extent of her mental development, making her the first language-deprived child to undergo any detailed study of her brain. It was intact and Shurley's sleep-studies found sleep patterns typical of a left-hemisphere dominant person, leading scientists to believe she was most likely right-handed. Over the following years multiple tests of her handedness supported this conclusion, as did observations of her in everyday situations. Based on their early tests, doctors had suspected her brain was extremely right-hemisphere dominant.

In early March of that year, neuroscientists Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima came from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to administer their own series of brain exams on Genie. Audiometry tests confirmed that she had normal hearing in both ears, but on a series of dichotic listening tests Bellugi and Klima found that she identified language sounds with 100% accuracy in her left one while correctly answering at only a chance level in her right one. Such an extreme level of asymmetry on these tests had previously only been documented in patients with either split-brain or who had undergone a hemispherectomy as an adult. When they gave her monaural tests for both language and non-language sounds she answered with 100% accuracy in both ears, which was normal. On non-language dichotic listening tests she showed a slight preference for identifying non-language sounds in her left one, which was typical for a right-handed person and helped rule out the possibility of her brain only being reversed in dominance for language.

Based on these results, Bellugi and Klima believed that Genie had been developing as a typical right-handed person until the time her father began isolating her. They attributed the imbalance between her hemispheres to the fact that her sensory input as a child was almost exclusively visual and tactile, stimulating functions which are predominantly controlled in the right hemisphere of a right-handed person, and although this input had been extremely minimal it was sufficient to cause their lateralization to the right hemisphere. Because she did not have significant linguistic input during her childhood, they concluded her left hemisphere underwent no specialization whatsoever so her language functions never lateralized to it. Since she accurately distinguished speech sounds with her right hemisphere, they thought her language functions had lateralized there instead.

Interest as a case study and grant funding

At the time of Genie's admission to the hospital there was wide discussion in both lay and academic circles about the hypotheses of Noam Chomsky, who had first suggested that language was innate

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