NAME: OLADELE OLAMIDE BLESSING

MATRIC NUMBER: 17BC022159

COURSE TITLE: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

ASSIGNMENT
FIVE EXPERIMENT IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND THE LESSON
LEARNT
There is an intimate connection between language and the brain. A part of the brain is
specially devoted to language and any injury to these areas disrupts language. In a young
child removal or injury of the left hemisphere of the brain which is responsible for language
would result into incomplete development of language. Thus, this shows that any disruption
in the normal brain development of a child would alter the language acquisition of child.
Hence, it is evident that normal brain development depends on early and regular exposure of
the language. In a normal situation a child is exposed to language from birth because adults
talk to the child both the doctors and parent. Children do not necessarily need language
instruction but rather exposure to language in order to develop, an example is a child who is
not taught how to act like the mother but copies the mother and her saying, such was not
taught to act like his or her mother but rather watching and observing. Noam Chomsky
suggested that acquiring language could not be fully explained by learning alone. Instead, he
proposed that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to
understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to
learn the language at a remarkable pace. A child that does not receive linguistic input during
their formative years do not achieve native like grammatical competence. The critical ag
hypothesis is part of the biological basis of language and postulates that the ability to learn a
native language develops within a fixed period, from birth to puberty. In the course of this
period, language acquisition flows easily, swiftly and without external intervention. After this
period the acquisition of grammar is difficult and some person do not complete it. For
example, on one hand is a child whose native language is Yoruba but is not taught the
language until when the child is 15, on the other hand a child who has been taught in his early
stage, from the age of 2 to 3 upwards would not have the same competence in speaking and
sentence formation as the latter. The child taught in his early stage would be more competent
in the language than the other child. Children who are denied of language during this critical
period would lead to lapse or incompetency in the language.

VICTOR THE WILD BOY

According to Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, Victor was a normal child at birth but was neglected
by his alcoholic parents from an early age. Afterwards, he then left civilization and fended for
himself in the wild. He was a French feral child who was found around the age of 12, he was
going through puberty, and the doctors could only assume his age at the time. Upon his
discovery, he was given to many people to stay with, fleeing civilization approximately eight
times. Eventually, his case was taken up by a young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who
worked with him for five years and gave him his name, victor. Itard was interested in
determining what Victor could learn. He devised procedures to teach victor words and
recorded his progress. Based on his work with Victor, Itard broke new ground in the
education of the developmentally delayed. Many assumptions were made about him, some
said he was mute, while others said he was deaf, he was taken to the National Institute of the
Deaf in Paris, although he showed no improvement at the institution. He later came across
itard, itard believed two things differentiated human from animal, language and empathy. He
showed progress while with itard but didn’t move past the basic stage. Victor only learnt to
spell out two phrases lait (milk) and oh, dieu (oh, god), he also progressed in showing
empathy as he displayed consoling behaviour towards the housekeeper who was crying over
the loss of her husband.

Roger Shattuck criticised Itard process of education and why he never attempted to teach
victor sign language. There are certain hypothesis that has been applied to victor one is that
victor developed a serious mental or psychological disturbance before his abandonment.
Precocious schizophrenia, infantile psychosis and autism amongst others.

GENIE

Genie's case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test. She spent almost her
entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated and abused for over a decade. Her story came
to light on November 4, 1970, in Los Angeles, California. A social worker discovered the 13-
year old girl after her mother sought out services for her own health. The social worker soon
discovered that the girl had been confined to a small room, and investigation by authorities
quickly revealed that the child had spent most of her life in this room, often tied to a potty
chair. The girl was given the name Genie in her case files to protect her identity and privacy.
Her father, mother, and older brother rarely spoke to her. The rare times her father did
interact with her, it was to bark or growl. After her discovery some psychologist and
language experts became interested in her case and the rehabilitation process began. None of
these children, regardless of the cause of isolation, was able to speak or knew any language at
the time of reintroduction to the society. This linguistic inability could simply be due to the
fact that they received no linguistic input, showing that exposure to language must trigger the
innate neurological ability of the human brain to acquire knowledge.

She began to acquire some language and was able to learn a large vocabulary, including
colours, shapes, objects and concrete terms but her syntax and morphology never fully
develped. It was reported that she could string together content word often with rich and clear
meaning but with little grammatical structure.

ISABELLE

Isabelle was born in 1932. She was an illegitimate child and was kept in seclusion for this
reason. Her mother had developed normally up to the age of two years and then, as a result of
an accident, had become deaf-mute and had not been educated. From the day Isabelle was
born until she was a little over six years of age, mother and child spent their time together in a
dark room with the blinds drawn, separated from the rest of the family. As a result of lack of
sunlight, fresh air, and proper nutrition, Isabelle had developed a rachitic condition that made
locomotion virtually impossible. This condition yielded to proper treatment, including
surgery, and Isabelle learned to walk and move normally. When her intelligence was first
tested at the age of six and a half, her mental age appeared to be about nineteen months. In
place of normal speech, she made a croaking sound. By means of intensive training and a
stimulating environment, Isabelle improved so much that she was considered a child of
normal intelligence by the age of eight. Her language development had been rapid, she
already had a vocabulary of 1,500 to 2,000 words, she enjoyed and could recite nursery
rhymes, she could tell a story and make one up. She could now create and share with others a
world of imagination and was not confined in her use of language to the immediate and the
concrete.

ANNA

Alice Marie Harris, known under the alias Anna, was a feral child from Pennsylvania who
was raised in isolation because she was an illegitimate child. From the age of five months to
six years, she was kept strapped down in the attic of her home, malnourished and unable to
speak or move. She was discovered and rescued in 1938. Her mother was busy working on
the farm during the day and occasionally went out at night. Anna was given only enough care
to keep her alive and received no instruction or positive attention. She was fed virtually
nothing else except for cow's milk and was strapped down to a chair or a cot for the majority
of her early life. When Anna was found at age 6, she could not talk or walk or do anything
that showed intelligence. She was also extremely undernourished and gaunt. Two years later,
she had learned to walk, understand simple commands, feed herself, and remember faces, but
she could not talk and in these respects resembled a 1-year-old infant more than the 7-year-
old child she really was. By the time she died of jaundice at about age 9, she had acquired the
speech of a 2-year-old.

CHEALSEA

Chelsea is a woman whose situation also supports the critical-age hypothesis. She was born
deaf in Northern California, isolated from ant major urban centre, and wrongly diagnosed as
retarded. Her devoted and caring family never believed this to be so. They knew she was
deaf, but in the small town where they lived there were no schools for the deaf, so she did not
attend school. When she was thirty-one, a neurologist finally diagnosed her deafness, and she
was fitted with hearing aids. She received extensive language therapy and a able to acquire a
large vocabulary but, like Genie, has not been able to develop a grammar. A study of the
localization of language in Chelsea’s brain revealed an equal response to language in both
hemispheres. In other words, Chelsea, like Genie, does not show the normal asymmetric
organization for language.

In conclusion, with the following stated cases, socialization makes it possible for us to fully
function as human beings. Without socialization, we would not have our society and culture.
And without social interaction, we would not have socialization. An example of a socially
isolated child was hypothetical, but real-life examples of such children, often
called feral children, have unfortunately occurred and provide distressing proof of the
importance of social interaction for socialization and of socialization for our ability to
function as humans.
REFERENCE

Cherry, K. (2021, February 26). The story of "GENIE," a Child deprived of nearly all human
contact. Retrieved March 19, 2021, from https://www.verywellmind.com/genie-the-
story-of-the-wild-child-2795241

Fromkin, V. A., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2019). An introduction to language (Seventh
ed.). Boston: Thomson. Retrieved March 18, 2021, from
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~pal/pdfs/pdfs/7th.pdf

Victor of Aveyron. (2021, March 15). Retrieved March 19, 2021, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron

Plessis, S. (2021, February 11). Isabelle: The story of a CHILD kept in extreme isolation.
Retrieved March 19, 2021, from https://www.edubloxtutor.com/isabelle-isolation/

Anna (feral CHILD). (2021, February 09). Retrieved March 19, 2021, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_(feral_child)

Sociology: Brief edition. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2021, from