Language Acquisition: Innate, Behavioral, or Something Else?

Language is the predominant human trait that separates us from other animals. Children successfully learn their first language in a matter of a few years without the need for formal lessons. Since language is intimately tied to humanity, it is not surprising that linguists and scientists are interested in children's acquisition of languages. The question posed by them has been: is language acquisition a process of filling a blank slate or the product of an innate brain structure?

The attempt to answer this question led to the proposal of the critical-period hypothesis, which was originally presented by linguist and neurologist Eric Lenneberg in his 1967 book, Biological Foundations of Language. The critical-period hypothesis suggests that the brain is able to learn a primary language during a certain period of a human’s life, but not later on. The general notion is that language cannot be learned post-puberty (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 78). To test this hypothesis, linguists and scientists would need a subject—a child past the age of puberty that had never been exposed to language. Finding such a child is highly unlikely and intentionally raising a child in an environment without language is immoral. The discovery of Genie, a feral child, provided linguists and scientists with the opportunity to test the critical-period hypothesis and determine how language is acquired.

I will start by briefly summarizing the case of Genie, specifically focusing on the details of her story that serve as a basis for understanding how language functions. Using Genie’s case as an example, I will challenge the critical-period hypothesis by explaining how humans are born with the innate competence to interpret and produce language but that this competence must be activated by environmental stimuli. I will also demonstrate how language can be acquired past the age of puberty but not to its fullest potential. Finally, I will further analyze how language operates by describing how the hemispheres of the brain play a role in producing and understanding spoken language.

Discovered when her nearly blind mother entered a Los Angeles welfare office in 1970, Genie aroused linguists and scientists’ curiosity. Because of her physical condition, the initial social worker presumed Genie to be a six or seven-year-old autistic child. It was later determined that Genie was thirteen years old, and her perceived autistic behavior was attributed to her inability to verbally communicate. Genie was taken into custody by the police, and admitted to the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital for observation and testing. There, the social workers learned that Genie had been harnessed to a toilet during the day, and restrained in a sleeping bag placed within a wire mesh, covered crib at night. Genie had spent her entire childhood locked away in a small bedroom (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 42-5).

Genie’s father demanded that the house be kept quiet, so the only language she heard was when her father swore. Beyond her father’s occasional outbursts, the only auditory stimulation Genie received was outside noises that trickled through a cracked window in her room. Overall, Genie grew up in an environment bereft of spoken language. As a result, her receptive vocabulary contained less than twenty words. She recognized nouns, including various colors; the word Mother; and objects such as door, jewelry box, and bunny. She also understood the verbs walk and go. Her productive vocabulary was more limited, and she could only speak using short, negative phrases, such as “stop it” and “no more” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 43). These language restrictions resulted from her father, who would beat her if she made any sound, and caused her to suppress her vocalizations and remain silent (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 44).

Victoria A. Fromkin, a psychologist assigned to Genie’s case, and Susan Curtiss, a graduate student studying linguistics, spent five years observing and testing Genie at the Children’s Hospital. In autumn of 1975, Genie entered the first of five foster homes where she received visits from Susan Curtiss, who continued to take notes on Genie’s language progression (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 64). In 1978, Genie was placed in her mother’s care who, once again, became Genie’s legal guardian before funding for Genie’s research came to halt in 1979 (Pines 32).

Researchers observed Genie for nine years, during which her ability to comprehend and produce language increased. Over the course of her first year, Genie utilized two and three-word sentences to describe her surroundings: “one black kitty” or “four orange fish.” She learned the difference between plural and singular nouns. Jean Butler, Genie’s teacher at the Children’s Hospital, reported that she and Genie conversed, and even argued, one evening for forty-five minutes after visiting a pet shop—an indication that Genie was grasping language (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 46). When someone said “turtles” or “balloons,” Genie recognized the ending s sound and would point to a picture of two turtles or balloons instead of the picture of just one. Genie also identified how to use prepositions, so when she was asked “Where are elephants found?” she replied, “In zoo.” She understood possessives, and could say, “Curtiss chin” or “Marilyn bike.” A year after that, she figured out how to insert a verb and say, “Miss Fromkin have blue car.” By November of 1971, Genie’s grammar resembled that of an average eighteen to twenty-month-old child. Although Genie mostly used two and three-word sentences, she did not just string together random words; the words she composed were “very strictly controlled and rule-governed” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 55-6).

Genie’s case became an example for linguists and scientists to study in order to determine whether language is an innate function every human being is born with, or if language is stimulated by one’s environment. Noam Chomsky, whose ideas founded the theory behind the innatist side of the debate, argued that the brain functions like every other organ in the body: “it has specialized structures with specialized functions, and language is one of these” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 50-1). Chomsky claimed there is a Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, that exists in every person at birth, and acts as a “device” that allows children to easily and rapidly acquire language (McLaughlin 114).

Electrophysiological research shows that language development starts when children respond to facial and vocal activity, and Chomsky believed this occurs because all humans have a neural preadaptation that is dedicated to this process (Locke 269). He also argued that children are not taught the definitions of words, but learn them through context. For example, if children are shown a thick, black pen and told it is called a pen, they understand the object being shown is a pen as opposed to thinking the word pen refers to it being black or thick. This suggests that there is a pre-existing rules system that children access to comprehend the definition of pen (Modgil 32). The problem has always been that no one can locate a gene or cell responsible for language (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 51).

B.F. Skinner proposed a different theory as to how language is acquired. He argued that language isn’t innate, but a result of “complex human behavior” that reflects a person’s ability to verbally respond to human experiences and interactions (McLaughlin 114). Like Chomsky, Skinner believed that children grasp language through reflexive behavior; that is, they recognize their caregivers’ eye gazes, facial movements, and speech patterns, then attempt to “mirror” them. Unlike Chomsky, who believed mirroring is an act of utilizing the innate LAD, Skinner believed this behavior exists outside children. He claimed that children react to external stimuli, which results in the acquisition of language and, over time, evolves into voluntary movements as children begin to communicate. In other words, children’s abilities to produce language “correlates with their response to increasingly complex stimuli and relationships in the environment” (McLaughlin 116-7).

The reason children continue to assert specific verbal behavior, according to Skinner, is because it is reinforced. When children cry, they are asking for something from their caregivers. Through repeated acts of crying (and other gestures), children realize that the sounds they voice create a response. Eventually these cries develop into morphemes that resemble the children’s native languages and, as a result, they are praised for uttering these sounds. Through reinforced behavior (i.e. attention from their caregivers) children’s utterances transition into speech and their first words (McLaughlin 119-20).

While Genie lacked the ability to produce speech, she still communicated in her own way. She interacted with objects and used her body to convey messages: scratching, throwing objects, slamming objects against each other, and shuffling her feet (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 65). Over time, the quality of Genie’s speech improved “tenfold”—an indication that she was learning language. She had progressed past the stage of making gestures and using objects to communicate, to verbalizing her feelings. For example, instead of throwing a tantrum when she felt upset, Genie was taught to say the word angry and “make a hitting motion in the air” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 46). Skinner concluded that the acquisition of language is a matter of habit formation and operant conditioning (McLaughlin 123). The problem was that language is a unique phenomenon that only humans are capable of, and if language is learned from one’s environment, then other species would be capable of learning language as well (Rymer, “Silent Childhood I” 51).

Genie was making progress and it appeared that she was acquiring language, but she still struggled with a few concepts. According to Susan Curtiss, Genie was good at vocabulary, a learned skill, and could easily convey a message. Her problem was syntax, which could be seen in the sentences she uttered. She might have said “Spot chew glove,” where the message was clear that the dog, Spot, chewed a glove, but the sentence itself was incomplete (“Secret of the Wild Child”).

Genie also struggled to produce interrogatives and would come up with “Where is may I have a penny?” or “I where is graham cracker on top shelf?” It was not that she couldn’t figure out questions, because she was able to answer them, but that she lacked what linguists call “movement”—“deriving the word order of the surface sentence (‘When is the train coming?’) from the word order of the declarative sentence underneath (‘The train is coming [soon]’)” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 57).

To come to a conclusion about language acquisition, it is equally important to consider how the brain biologically processes language. Testing has shown that both hemispheres of the brain interpret the meaning of words but that the left hemisphere more often processes the “grammatical function of language,” meaning syntactical and lexical. To figure out why Genie couldn’t overcome her difficulties with syntax, a scatter test was run on her that “divided her learned skills, such as vocabulary, from those said to be innate, such as syntax.” The result showed that Genie’s syntactic abilities had been constrained by her age as predicted by the critical-period hypothesis. Furthermore, Genie’s test results indicated that her “spatial” right hemisphere was dominant over her “linguistic” left hemisphere. Another test showed that Genie was not using her left hemisphere for language at all; it appeared to be “functionally dead” (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 58, 67-8).

Based on Genie’s test results, linguists concluded that external interaction with language triggers the “normal pattern of hemispheric specialization,” and assigns the task of comprehending and producing language to the left hemisphere. If the brain does not develop at the appropriate time, language acquisition may be limited to the right hemisphere (Pines 31). This means that children are born with the innate ability to organize language, but these skills must be initiated by an environmental “slap.” This “slap” is better defined as the interaction and exposure to grammar, in context, a child hears in speech. By the time Genie received this “slap,” it was too late; therefore, her right hemisphere took over the controls of language, and she was unable to produce verbal language to its fullest potential (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 68-9).

Genie’s linguistic development has disproved the critical-period hypothesis because she acquired language after the onset of puberty. On the other hand, her language achievement was incomplete, and she could not comprehend language past a certain point. Genie continued to use mostly two-word phrases and never progressed to speaking in complete sentences. It has been concluded that grammatical maturity needs linguistic stimulation (Rymer, “Silent Childhood II” 56). When children are isolated from language past the appropriate age (this age most likely being puberty), they lose the ability to speak in full sentences because “the cortical tissue normally committed for language and related abilities may functionally atrophy” (Pines 31). This concludes that children learn the “rules of grammar by extracting the regularities or patterns in the language they are exposed to.” Children are only able to do this because there is an innate device, such as Chomsky’s LAD, that governs their language acquisition and production (McLaughlin 123). Although more research is needed, the reality is that children would never talk unless they were taught, and children could not be taught unless they already possessed, through genetics, a specific set of “arrangements for training” (Locke 267).

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