On November 4, 1970, a social worker in Arcadia, California encountered a girl who appeared to be six or seven years old.
She wasn’t six. She was thirteen.
She weighed 59 pounds. She couldn’t stand up straight. She couldn’t chew solid food. She couldn’t speak—not a word, not a sound beyond occasional whimpers.
She’d been locked in a small room for nearly her entire life. Tied to a potty chair during the day, confined to a sleeping bag in a crib at night. No toys. No conversation. No human interaction beyond someone occasionally bringing food.
For thirteen years.
When she was discovered, the scientific community saw an opportunity: could she learn language? Could she recover? Was there a critical period for becoming human, and if so, had she passed it?
They called her “Genie.”
And what happened next is one of the most tragic and ethically complicated cases in the history of psychology.
The Isolation
Genie’s father was severely mentally ill with delusional beliefs. He decided his daughter was “retarded” (she wasn’t) and that the best course was to isolate her from the world.
From the age of about 20 months until she was 13 years old, Genie lived in near-total isolation.
She was confined to a small bedroom in the back of the house. The windows were covered. The door was mostly closed.
During the day, she was strapped naked to a potty chair, unable to move her arms or legs. She could only move her hands and feet.
At night, she was placed in a sleeping bag and confined in a crib covered with wire mesh.
If she made noise, her father beat her. He didn’t speak to her—he barked and growled at her like an animal. Other family members were forbidden from speaking to her.
She was fed only soft foods—baby food and cereal. She never learned to chew.
She had almost no sensory stimulation. No one spoke to her. She had no toys, no books, no human contact beyond the minimal physical care needed to keep her alive.
For eleven years.
The Discovery
Genie’s mother was nearly blind and was herself a victim of severe abuse from the father.
In 1970, after a violent argument, the mother fled the house with Genie and sought assistance at a social services office.
When the social worker saw Genie, she could barely believe what she was seeing.
A thirteen-year-old who looked like a young child. Who couldn’t walk properly—she moved in a strange bunny-hop gait because she’d never learned to walk normally. Who was completely silent. Who seemed more animal than human.
Genie was immediately removed from the home and placed in Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Her father was charged with child abuse. Before the trial, he committed suicide, leaving a note saying “The world will never understand.”
Her mother was charged but the charges were eventually dropped—she was considered a victim as well.
And Genie became the subject of intense scientific study.
The Scientific Opportunity
From a research perspective, Genie’s case was unprecedented.
Scientists had long debated whether there’s a “critical period” for language acquisition—a window in early childhood during which the brain is primed to learn language, after which it becomes difficult or impossible.
Linguist Noam Chomsky had proposed that humans have an innate language faculty that requires exposure during this critical period to develop properly.
But there was no way to test this ethically. You couldn’t deliberately isolate a child from language to see what happens.
Genie was, tragically, a natural experiment. She’d been deprived of language during the entire proposed critical period (roughly birth to puberty).
Could she learn language now? Could her brain, at age 13, still develop linguistic abilities?
Or was the window closed?
The Interventions
A team of psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists began working with Genie.
She was placed in a foster home with one of the researchers. She received intensive language training, therapy, education, and care.
And she made progress—remarkable progress in some areas:
She learned to recognize hundreds of words. She could understand simple commands and questions.
She learned to express basic needs and wants.
She could produce single words and sometimes two-word combinations: “want milk,” “blue car.”
She learned some sign language and used it more successfully than spoken language.
Her non-verbal intelligence tests showed she had normal cognitive abilities. She wasn’t intellectually disabled—she’d been deprived, not damaged at birth.
She bonded with her caregivers. She showed emotions. She played. She seemed to enjoy learning.
But there were limits—devastating limits.
The Limits
Despite years of intensive intervention, Genie never developed full language.
She couldn’t produce grammatically complex sentences. She never mastered basic grammar rules that children typically acquire naturally.
A typical three-year-old says: “I want to go to the store with Mommy.”
Genie, even after years of training, produced utterances like: “Want go store.”
She understood simple syntax but couldn’t produce it. She could follow basic grammar when listening but couldn’t generate it when speaking.
Brain scans showed her language processing was abnormal. In typical people, language is primarily processed in the left hemisphere.
In Genie, language appeared to be processed primarily in the right hemisphere—the pattern seen in people who learn language very late or who’ve had left-hemisphere damage early in life.
Her brain had reorganized language processing in an atypical way, and the result was fundamentally limited linguistic ability.
The critical period hypothesis appeared to be confirmed: there is a window for language acquisition, and Genie had missed it.
The Ethical Disaster
What happened to Genie after the initial research is heartbreaking.
The scientists studying her became competitive. Different researchers fought over access to her, over research directions, over publication rights.
Funding ran out. The research team disbanded.
Genie was moved from foster home to foster home. Some were abusive. In one home, she was punished for vomiting by having her face forced into her own vomit.
The trauma and instability caused her to regress. She stopped speaking almost entirely.
She eventually became a ward of the state and was placed in an institution for developmentally disabled adults.
The researchers who’d promised to help her had used her as a research subject and then abandoned her when the funding and publications dried up.
Her mother sued several of the researchers for excessive testing and exploitation. The case was settled.
Genie still lives in an institution today. She’s in her sixties. She remains largely silent.
The opportunity to “study” her came at the cost of her chance for a stable, caring environment. The science was prioritized over her wellbeing.
Victor of Aveyron
Genie’s case wasn’t the first feral child. The most famous historical case was Victor of Aveyron, discovered in France in 1800.
Victor was found living wild in the forests of southern France. He appeared to be about 11 or 12 years old. He was naked, dirty, couldn’t speak, ate raw food, and behaved more like an animal than a child.
It’s unclear whether he was abandoned as a young child and survived alone in the wild, or whether he had some human contact intermittently. Scars on his body suggested someone may have tried to kill him at some point.
A young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, took responsibility for Victor and attempted to educate him.
Itard worked with Victor for five years. Victor learned some basics:
- Recognizing and responding to his name
- Understanding simple spoken words
- Following basic commands
- Performing simple tasks
But like Genie, Victor never developed real language. He learned perhaps 20-30 words but never combined them into sentences. He never learned to read beyond recognizing a few written words.
He lived until about age 40, cared for by a woman who’d helped Itard in the educational attempts. He remained limited in language and social abilities his entire life.
Itard concluded that Victor had passed the critical period for language development and that full linguistic ability was therefore impossible.
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Both Genie’s and Victor’s cases support the critical period hypothesis:
There’s a window in early development during which the brain is primed to acquire language. Miss that window, and full language acquisition becomes extremely difficult or impossible.
For language, this window appears to close around puberty.
Children learn languages effortlessly before puberty. Adults can learn new languages but with much more difficulty and rarely achieve native-like proficiency.
Children who are deaf and don’t receive sign language exposure until adolescence or adulthood never achieve native-level sign language fluency.
The brain regions responsible for language have a time-limited plasticity. During the critical period, they’re highly adaptable, ready to be shaped by linguistic input.
After the critical period, those regions become less plastic. They can still learn and adapt, but not to the same degree.
If you don’t receive language input during the critical period, the language regions don’t develop properly. And once the period has passed, they can’t fully catch up.
The Deeper Question
But the critical period for language points to a more disturbing question:
Is there a critical period for becoming human?
Language isn’t just communication. It’s thought. It’s culture. It’s how we organize our internal experience.
Without language, what is consciousness like?
Genie and Victor thought something. They experienced the world. They had desires, preferences, emotions.
But without language to structure and articulate those experiences, what were they?
Are you fully human without language? Or is language so fundamental to human cognition that without it, you’re something else—something between human and animal?
That’s not a question science can answer. It’s philosophical, ethical, existential.
But Genie and Victor force us to confront it.
Other Cases
There have been other feral or severely isolated children, though cases are rare:
Kaspar Hauser (Germany, 1828): Teenage boy who appeared in Nuremberg claiming to have been raised in total isolation in a dark cell. He learned to speak but never fully integrated into society. His case was controversial—some think he was a fraud or a victim of political intrigue rather than true isolation.
Isabelle (USA, 1930s): Discovered at age 6, had been isolated with her deaf-mute mother. After intervention, she learned language and eventually attended school normally. Key difference: she was discovered much younger than Genie or Victor, within the critical period.
Oxana Malaya (Ukraine, 1991): Discovered at age 8, had lived with dogs for several years. She walked on all fours, barked, and behaved like a dog. With intervention, she learned language and basic social skills but remains impaired.
The pattern: the younger the child when discovered, the better the prognosis. The longer the deprivation during the critical period, the more permanent the damage.
The Responsibility
Every feral child case raises the question: who’s responsible for helping them?
These children are victims of horrific abuse or abandonment. They deserve care, stability, love, and the best possible interventions.
But they’re also scientifically fascinating. They offer insights into human development that can’t be obtained any other way.
The conflict between the child’s needs and the scientific opportunity is inherent and troubling.
In Genie’s case, that conflict was resolved in favor of science, and Genie paid the price.
Researchers competed to study her. She was moved frequently to accommodate research needs. She was subjected to extensive testing that was sometimes distressing for her.
When the research funding ended, so did much of the care.
That’s unconscionable.
These children aren’t research subjects who happen to need care. They’re traumatized victims who deserve care, and any research must be entirely secondary to their wellbeing.
The Haunting Possibility
The most disturbing implication of feral child cases:
Humanity might not be innate. It might be learned.
We like to think that being human is something you are, not something you become.
But language, social skills, cultural knowledge, even certain ways of thinking—all of these are learned through exposure to other humans during critical developmental periods.
Miss those periods, and you might be human genetically but not functionally.
Genie had human DNA. A human brain. Human potential.
But eleven years of isolation during the critical period meant she could never fully become what we recognize as a fully functioning human adult.
That suggests that humanity is fragile. It requires specific inputs at specific times. It can be lost through deprivation.
We’re not born human. We become human. And that process can fail.
Where They Are Now
Victor died in 1828, having lived a simple life under care, never developing full language or independence.
Genie, now in her 60s, lives in an institution. She’s rarely seen by anyone outside the facility. The researchers who studied her are forbidden from contacting her.
She remains largely silent. After all the interventions, all the research, all the hope—she’s still profoundly limited in language and social abilities.
She missed the critical period. And despite everyone’s efforts, that loss could never be fully recovered.
The Lesson
Feral child cases teach us something heartbreaking about human development:
There are windows of opportunity that, once closed, can never be reopened.
Language, social bonding, certain cognitive skills—all have critical periods.
Deprive a child during those periods, and you inflict damage that’s permanent.
This makes early childhood intervention crucial. A child deprived of language at age 1-3 can recover completely if intervention happens by age 4-5.
Wait until age 13, and recovery is partial at best.
The brain’s plasticity—its ability to learn and adapt—is highest in early childhood and decreases with age.
We have one chance to build the fundamental architecture of human cognition. That chance is early childhood.
Miss it, and you can’t go back.
The Question That Remains
If you were isolated from language and human contact from birth until adulthood, would you still be “you”?
Would you have an internal experience? Thoughts? A sense of self?
Or would those things—the things we think of as constituting a person—simply not develop without the linguistic and social inputs that shape human consciousness?
Genie and Victor had inner lives. They felt emotions. They had preferences and personalities.
But without language, without the developmental experiences that shape a human mind, were those inner lives recognizably human?
Or were they something else—something we can’t fully imagine because our own consciousness is so fundamentally shaped by language and social experience?
We’ll never know. We can only wonder.
And be grateful that for most of us, the question is only theoretical.
Sources:
- Curtiss, S. (1977). Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child”. Academic Press.
- Rymer, R. (1993). Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight from Silence. HarperCollins.
- Lane, H. (1976). The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Harvard University Press.
- Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley.
- Newton, M. (2002). Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Faber and Faber.
Next in the series: Prosopagnosia: Living in a World Without Faces - When you cannot recognize anyone’s face, including your own family’s, or even your own reflection.