LA IN EXTREME CONDITIONS

Sepulveda A. John Hamilton

Nowadays, the scientific investigations in LA have intervened and evidenced critical

cases where children have to learn their first language under extreme conditions: wild,

deaf, blind and neglected children.

To begin with, wild children have the particularity to be isolated or neglected for

their parents, or even cared by animals acquiring part of its behaviors. These children

cannot live a social life, since they don’t feel confident with each others, they are afraid;

social interaction are difficult because some of them get communicate by means of

sounds, or simply they cannot talk.

The neuropsychologist, Eric Lenneberg (1967), proposes the critical period

hypothesis. This is a critical age where children who are in the puberty or more will

never master language at all, that is to say, a child in this age never learns to

communicate properly.

Lenneberg supports his theory of the innate language learning circumscribed in time

with the LAD of Chomsky; where language is an innate faculty of children who learn it

in a short time. However, if a child produces different kind of sentences with a correct

grammar order, Lenneberg would be wrong.

Therefore, a group of scientists decided to analyze a child called Genie, who was

13 years old, with the aim to demonstrate the falsity of Lenneberg`s theory.
 LA IN EXTREME CONDITIONS 1

The case of Genie was special, since she was locked up by her father for eleven years

where she didn’t have any visual and physical stimulation. She only knew 2 words:

stopit and nomore.

Genie could distinguish some verbs, and nouns, but she could not produce sentences

correctly.

Hence, Lenneberg`s theory could be right, in spite of it was nor proven.

Otherwise, handicapped children have the same concern to learn a language before

puberty. Because they would achieve fluency in the language, in the specific case of

blind children throughout the parents help and the deaf children throughout the ASL

(American Sign Language). Nevertheless, if they don’t learn a language before puberty,

they would lose the skill to speak in a native accent. They would learn a language as

people who learn a foreign language.

Children are programmed to learn a language in a determined time, even though

parents speak or not properly. (Steven Pinker)

References

 Burge, Janet E. Knowledge Elicitation Methods

Web sites

 http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jbur ge/thesis/kematrix.html