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Language & Communication, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 261-280, 1995 Copyright © 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd

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C O N T R A D I C T I O N S AND U N A N S W E R E D Q U E S T I O N S IN T H E G E N I E CASE: A F R E S H L O O K AT T H E L I N G U I S T I C E V I D E N C E 1

PETER E. JONES

Introduction The 'Genie' case (cf. Curtiss, 1977) hardly needs introduction since it is widely known and discussed well beyond the narrow circles of academic linguistics and psychology. The celebrity of the case is due both to its intrinsic human interest and to the fact that it has enormous general scientific, and specifically linguistic, significance. The main findings and conclusions from the linguistic research, very largely the work of Susan Curtiss, concerning Genie's progress in and capacity for language acquisition, are frequently cited in the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. The principal scientific conclusion drawn from the case is that Genie could not learn English morphology and syntax, a point of view presented rather straightforwardly by Curtiss herself in the following way (in Rymer, 1993):

She was a very communicative person. But, despite trying, she never mastered the rules o f grammar, never couM use the little pieces--the word endings, for instance. She had a clear semantic ability but could not learn syntax (p. 160, my emphasis).

It is this verdict on Genie's language which has been repeated, uncritically throughout the wider linguistic and psycholinguistic literature (see, for example, Aitchison, 1989; Akmajian et al., 1992; Harris, 1990; Taylor, 1990, etc.). The linguistic findings, in turn, have been variously presented by Curtiss and others as critical evidence on such questions as the existence of critical periods in language acquisition, the modularity of mind, and on innate syntactic ability.

All of this would, in itself, justify close scrutiny of the original linguistic data and their analysis. The need for a reappraisal of the linguistic evidence has become especially pressing, however, with the appearance recently of new and more complete tellings of the Genie story (e.g. Rymer, 1993; BBC, 1994). These accounts have thrown up many facts about the case which had not been previously published by any of the Genie researchers, and, in addition, have raised serious questions about the validity and ethics of the Genie research programme itself. These issues, too, will clearly need to be addressed at some stage to permit a balanced evaluation of the overall outcomes of the Genie research but are beyond the scope of this paper.

The intention here, consequently, is to present a critical review of the published accounts of Genie's progress in language acquisition, focusing very narrowly on her acquisition of English morphology and syntax, which, for obvious theoretical reasons, has been accorded the greatest weight in the assessments of Genie's linguistic achievements and capabilities. More specifically, this paper will identify what appear to be serious discrepancies and inconsistencies in the accounts

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Dr E E. Jones, School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield S 10 2BP, U.K.

261

262 PETER E. JONES

of Genie's linguistic development which have appeared between 1974 and 1988. I will suggest, in fact, that accounts up to and including Curtiss (1977) are significantly at odds with accounts from 1978 to date, including that given above from Rymer (1993). These two contrasting sets of accounts will be referred to as 'the (1977) account' and 'the post-(1977) account', respectively.

The data Genie was first hospitalized in November 1970, at the age of 13 years and 7 months.

Observations of Genie's linguistic development began to be made from about this time up until the beginning of 1978. This gives a maximum time period of approximately 7 years and 2 months during which Genie was accessible to linguists and psychologists for research purposes. The vast majority of linguistic data were collected by Susan Curtiss who had continuous contact with Genie over a period of approximately 6 years and 6 months, from June 1971 until January 1978. For convenience of reference, these data will be assigned to the following three time periods:

Period 1: a 4-year period from June 1971 until June 1975 during which Curtiss collected data for her Ph.D. on Genie.

Period 2: a period of 2 years and 1 month, from July 1975 until August 1977 during which no funded linguistic research with Genie took place.

Period 3: a period of 5 months from August 1977 until January 1978 during which Curtiss carried out further funded research on Genie.

The most recent piece of linguistic data to be published is dated November 1977 (Curtiss, 1982). Curtiss herself saw Genie for the final time on 3 January 1978 (Rymer, 1993) and after guardianship of Genie was transferred to her natural mother on 20 March 1978 (ibid.), there has been no formal scientific contact with Genie whatsoever.

The linguistic data are highly unusual in quantity and quality. As Curtiss (1977) explains, Genie rarely spoke, which made it impracticable to rely on data collection by audio tape. Hundreds of video tapes were made, however, extracts from which were shown in BBC (1994), and which do contain speech material 2 The 'primary source of data' (Curtiss, 1977, p. 46), nevertheless, is detailed notes and transcriptions of Genie's utterances made by Curtiss in notebooks as she followed Genie around and interacted with her. Some utterances were clearly transcribed phonetically as demonstrated by the detailed discussion in Curtiss (1977) of Genie's developing segmental and supra-segmental phonological system. In the published papers, however, data are rarely presented in any other way than in Standard American English orthography, complete with full stops and capital letters, with no indication of utterance dynamics, hesitations, duration of utterance or syllable length etc. In addition, in many cases when data are used there is no accompanying indication of discourse context or context of situation, although glosses are often given. These facts in themselves raise important issues about the status of the data and their interpretation. In terms of quantity, Curtiss (1977) claims that the total number of spontaneous utterances (excluding repetitions) of two or more words in length recorded during Period 1 is 2500, a miniscule data base if compared with normal children's output. Several hundred of these utterances are cited in Curtiss (1977). For Periods 2 and 3, the picture is unclear since the total amount of data collected is not quantified, nor is there any overview of the quality or general characteristics of the data. During Period 2, Curtiss was apparently not officially carrying out linguistic research but still visited Genie every week (Rymer, 1993). I have been able to find only 4 different utterances from this period and only 1 for the whole of 1976. For Period 3, 34 different utterances in total have been

THE GENIE CASE--A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 263

cited. All the utterances for Periods 2 and 3 cited in published papers are reproduced below. Clearly, this is an extremely fragile data base from which to draw definitive conclusions about Genie's language development. In addition, Genie's language was narrowly skewed in terms of communicative function and her discourse interactions with surrounding adults were far from normal:

Nonetheless, in total, Genie performs few normal or appropriate acts and, in large measure, appears to be conversationally incompetent. Verbal interaction with Genie consists mainly of someone's asking Genie a question repeatedly until Genie answers, or of Genie's making a comment and someone else's responding to it in some w a y . . . Except for those instances where Genie exerts control over the topic through repetition, verbal interaction with Genie is almost always controlled and/or 'normalized' by the person talking to Genie, not by Genie (Curtiss, 1977, p. 233).

All of the above facts make it necessary, therefore, to approach all statements about Genie's linguistic achievements with extreme caution. With this in mind, let us now proceed to examine the (1977) account of Genie's acquisition of language.

The (1977) account The (1977) account consists of three published works, namely Fromkin et al. (1974), Curtiss

et al. (1974), and Curtiss (1977). Each will be examined in turn.

The early report by Fromkin et al. (1974), based on Genie's profile in the Summer of 1972 (or a tittle later), presents a picture of steady and continuing development in Genie's productive spoken language abilities on all fronts--phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic-- and of the development of literacy skills. Her syntactic progress is described in the following terms:

Genie's ability to combine a finite set of linguistic elements to form new combinations, and the ability to produce sentences consisting of conjoined sentences shows that she has acquired two essential elements of language that permit the generation of an infinite set of sen tences . . . It is clear even from this summary that Genie is learning language. Her speech is rule-governed---she has fixed word-order of basic sentence elements and constituents, and systematic ways of expressing syntactic and semantic relations (p. 92).

The authors noted, too, that Genie had begun 'to add the progressive aspect marker "ing" to verbs, always appropriately to denote ongoing action' (p. 91) and to mark such 'grammatical morphemes' as plurals and possessives (ibid.).

Curtiss et al. (1974), based on Genie's profile at the end of 1972, presents a similar picture: Her comprehension of WH-questions, relative clauses, singular-plural distinctions, negatives etc., and her production of complex NP's, sentence conjunctions etc. provide evidence that there is a steady if modest progress in first-language acquisi t ion. . . Her language acquisition so far shows that, despite the tragic isolation which she had suffered, despite the lack of linguistic input, despite the fact that she had no language for almost the first fourteen years of life, Genie is equipped to learn language and she is learning it. No one can predict how far she will develop linguistically or cognitively. The progress so far, however, has been remarkable, and is a tribute to the human capacity for intellectual achievement (p. 544).

The authors also demonstrate the appearance of bound morphological elements (progressive 'ing', some sporadic plural markers, possessive endings), of strong past tense forms, and of prepositions (pp. 537-538), and argue that Genie's utterances are not mere imitations of an adult model on the basis of her production of complex NPs which 'display obvious non-imitative order' (p. 536). They go on to describe a significant competence-performance disparity in Genie's overall linguistic profile:

Such utterances provide clear evidence that Genie, like normal children, is not learning language by imitation alone. They also reveal that the length o f Genie's utterances does not directly reflect her syntactic capabilities. That is, given the fact that she does on occasion produce utterances of more than three or four morphemes, the infrequency of such utterances may be explained by her difficulties--both physiological and emotional---in producing speech, rather than by limitations of her linguistic competence. Thus, when Genie fails to communicate her message with one- or two-word utterances, she can expand the sentences, revealing a more extensive system than usually appears on the surface (pp. 536-537, my emphasis).

264 PETER E. JONES

Curtiss (1977) is the most important and thorough study of Genie's language to date. Overall, Curtiss concludes that neither Genie's productive competence taken as a whole, nor the development of that competence over time, were normal. In terms of the linguistic model that Curtiss applied to Genie's language, she still lacked, at the end of Period 1, permutation rules, most AUX elements, all WH-words, most deictic elements, and conjunctions, and her use and/or acquisition of grammatical formatives was incomplete and distinctly patchy? In relation to the rate of Genie's linguistic progress, Curtiss also has the following to say:

Genie's linguistic development, especially her speech development, has been quite slow, extremely slow compared to normals. Her two-word stage lasted for 4 months; negative sentences remained in the same state of development for almost 3 years. Despite the fact that Genie has acquired many grammatical morphemes, her speech remains largely telegraphic--4 years after she began putting words together. The great explosion has simply not occurred (p. 193).

Nevertheless, Curtiss provides abundant evidence to show that Genie had made and was continuing to make significant progress in language acquisition. In particular, she paints a picture of unusual, but steady, uninterrupted, and unfinished development in both morphology and syntax in Genie's speech. Table 1 displays key milestones in Genie's syntactic development (from Curtiss, 1977) while Table 2 reproduces Curtiss's own table 9.4 (1977, p. 176), charting Genie's progress in the acquisition of morphology and grammatical formatives. It should be stressed that these tables are intended to give only a rough indication of Genie's progress and can only be properly understood in conjunction with the explanations and qualifications given in Curtiss (1977).

Table 1. Chronology of significant stages in the development of Genie's productive competence (after Curtiss, 1977)

Page Date Item Comment

144 July 71 2-word utterances ( - verb) All of the form NP + NP 145 Oct. 71 2-word utterances (+ verb) 145 Nov. 71 3(+) -word utterances All basic sentence constituents surface 150 Begin. 72 Negative sentences All NEG + Noun 163 Jan. 72 Non-sentences Strings apparently without coherent

internal structure Without prepositions Strings of 2 or more verbs (V--~V + VP) Verb + Particle structures in and on first spontaneous use of the Noun + Predicate Adjective/NP + NP Subject--Object possession without have

153 Jan. 72 Locative structures 156 Early 72 'Serial' Verb Phrases 157 Early 72 2-word Verbs 153 Early 72 Prepositions 146 Spring 72 Determiner 149 Spring 72 'Predicate nominatives' 149 Summer 72 Possession S-O

148 Autumn 72 Compound NPs 149 Dec. 72 Possession S-O 158 End 72 Recursion

154 Early 73 Prepositional Phrases

148 Spring 73 Determiner nother 157 Spring 73 First person pronoun 1 157 Spring 73 Imperatives 163 Mid 73 Non-sentences

172 Autumn 73 Contractible copula 173 Autumn 73 AUX be of be + ing 147 Late 73 Articles

165 Jan 74 Copula

Without and Subject-Object possession with have G's grammar developed property of recursion in verb + complement strings PPs as adverbial modifiers of full sentences, never following object NP G expands determiner category Growth of self-awareness True commands to others New type in response to question modelling

Both am and is forms Definite and indefinite used with some regularity

continued on next page

THE GENIE CASE,---A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 265

148 May 74 Compound NPs 148 May 74 Compound NPs 173 Spring 74 2nd person pronoun 179 Summer 74 Benefactive structure 147 Autumn 74 Definite Article 151 Autumn 74 Internal negative

151 Oct 74 Internal negative 160 Oct 74 Compound VP 184 Nov 74 Utterances of if-then type 155 Latter part of 74 Prepositional Phrases 151 End 74 Internal negatives 159 75 Embedded sentences 159 Early 75 New Sentence structure 155 First half 75 Prepositional Phrases

With and With and and as part of full sentences you (singular) Not always overtly marked Only example of the in subject NP First example of 'part-imitated, part-spontaneous' S-internal negative Fully spontaneous Debatable Conditional utterances without if-then PPs modifying object NP Now definitely acquired

'A sort of serial construction' 2 PPs within same sentence and complex NP within PP for first time

171 Spring 75 Past time Sign-language past time marker fhst use 175 Spring 75 Dummy DO First appropriate and inappropriate uses

Table 2. Order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Genie's grammar (after table 9.4, Curtiss, 1977)

Morpheme Date acquired

negative marker, on and in, article (the) Spring 1972 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

-ing, me and you (?) (objects) Autumn 1972 plural, possessive, 1 Spring 1973 third person singular irregular (?), past irregular Autumn 1973 (?), contractible copula, contractible auxiliary you (subject) (?) Spring 1974 dummy DO (?) Spring 1975

Morphemes 'which have only questionably been acquired' are indicated by a (?).

A r o u g h i dea o f G e n i e ' s g r a m m a t i c a l p r o g r e s s c a n b e o b t a i n e d f r o m an e x a m i n a t i o n o f

he r ' l e ad ing edge ' u t t e rances f r o m 1974 and 1975, o f w h i c h 11, f r o m Cur t i ss (1977) are g i v e n in

Tab le 3.

Table 3

Utterance Date Page

1 Curtiss is dancing 19 June 74 196 2 I want think about Mama riding bus 20 Nov. 74 159 3 I want you open my mouth 5 March 75 159 4 Teacher is boss at school 2 April 75 172 5 Coffee on the table is spill[ed] 29 April 75 159 6 Teacher said Genie have temper tantrum outside 2 May 75 159 7 I am thinking bout Miss J. at school in hospital 6 May 75 155 8 M. said not lift my leg in the dentist chair 14 May 75 175 9 Mr W. say put face in big swimming pool 10 June 75 159

10 I do not have a toy green basket 25 June 75 175 11 I do not have a red pail 25 June 75 175

S i g n i f i c a n t l y , C u r t i s s r e p e a t e d l y e m p h a s i z e s the ' g r e a t d i s p a r i t y b e t w e e n c o m p e t e n c e a n d

p e r f o r m a n c e w h e n it c o m e s to he r p r o d u c t i o n ' (p. 196) a l ready n o t e d in Cur t i s s e t al. (1974) . She

exp la ins :

266 PETER E. JONES

Most of Genie's rules are optional; sometimes they apply, sometimes they do not. This variability in rule application, coupled with the preponderance of reduction and deletion, produces a surface syntax that often masks the underlying grammar. In other words, Genie's speech seldom reveals the amount and range of linguistic structures and elements she has acquired (1977, p. 196, my emphasis).

And elsewhere: Genie's language performance often does not reflect her underlying linguistic ability. Inproducfion she rarely makes use of certain rules (pluralization, for example) or produces certain structures she is capable of producing (e.g., complements, embeddings) (p. 203, my emphasis).

Curtiss consequently stresses the importance of interpreting the surface forms of Genie's utterances in relation to the more sophisticated underlying system of productive competence:

• . . in contrast to normal children, Genie's utterances continued to appear 'telegraphic', even long after exceptional utterances revealed that she had acquired much of the morphological machinery omitted from these 'telegraphic' strings (pp. 196-197, my emphasis).

In fact under the heading 'LAZY BEHAVIOUR', Curtiss recounts that Genie became known as 'the Great Abbreviator' (p. 29) since she spoke as little as was absolutely necessary in order to communicate: 'She thus presented a misleading picture; she was capable of producing longer and more complex strings than those she generally used' (p. 28). Another factor which should be taken into account, although I will pay no further attention to it here, is the interaction between Genie's phonological and grammatical development. 4 Curtiss shows, for example, that Genie's simplification of fmal consonant clusters could account for the few instances of plurals in her speech (p. 170).

In the light of Genie's evident and continuing linguistic progress Curtiss's overall assessment is positive and her prognosis optimistic:

Genie's language is far from normal. More important, however, over and above the specific similarities and differences that exist between Genie's language and the language of normal children, we must keep in mind that Genie's speech is rule-governed behaviour, and that from a finite set of arbitrary linguistic elements she can and does create novel utterances that theoretically have no upper bound. These are the aspects of human language that set it apart from all other animal communication systems. Therefore, abnormalities notwithstanding, in the mast fundamental and critical aspects, Genie has language (p. 204, my emphasis).

And elsewhere: My work with Genie continues, and Genie continues to change, becoming a fuller person, realizing more of her human potential. By the time this work is read, she may have developed far beyond what is described here. That is my hope--that I will not be able to keep up with her, that she will have the last word (p. 42, my emphasis)•

Let us now turn to an examination of the post-(1977) account.

The post-(1977) account The post-(1977) consists of the following nine published papers: Curtiss et al. (1978, 1979),

Curtiss (1979), Curtiss (1981a, b), Curtiss (1982), Curtiss (1985), Curtiss (1988a, b), plus the accounts given in Rymer (1993) and BBC (1994). Each will be examined in turn.

Curtiss et al. (1978) contains no new linguistic data and its conclusions and generalizations appear to be based on Curtiss (1977). However, the paper is distinctly different in tone and displays a rather negative attitude towards Genie's language which is characterized in bold terms as 'syntactically primitive and underdeveloped' (1978, p. 29), a characterization which the authors neither elaborate nor qualify in relation to the competence-performance disparity. They present as evidence 'a few aspects of her spontaneous speech, all of which lag behind her current vocabulary level' (ibid.). Tho first piece of evidence relates to Genie's acquisition of 'grammatical morphemes' about which the authors state:

THE GENIE CASE--A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 267

Genie appears to be acquiring these morphemes in an order not totally unlike first language acquirers . . , and not surprisingly, her order of acquisition looks more like first than second language acquisition.. . While she has made progress in morphology (table two), she has not yet completed full acquisition of most of these fourteen morphemes (ibid.).

The authors go on to list 9 of the 14 morphemes in question in order of acquisition by Genie, following Curtiss (1977); cf. Table 2 above. The second piece of alleged evidence relevant to the discussion here relates to Genie's acquisition of negation, described in the following terms:

While Genie was able to express a great deal of semantic complexity in her negative sen tences . . , the syntax of her negative sentences remained at the most primitive level. Recently [sic], Genie has begun to use negative sentences which appear to be form (2) and (3) [i.e. sentence-internal negation and negation with do-support, respectively] such as 'You have no book', 'I do not have red pail' (5/75) ~ (p. 30).

I submit that these pieces of 'evidence' contradict, rather than support, the claim that Genie's speech is 'syntactically primitive and undeveloped' since they show quite clearly, as did Curtiss (1977) from which the facts are drawn, that Genie had begun to acquire, and was continuing to acquire, morphological and grammatical elements.

Curtiss (1979) and Curtiss e t al. (1979) are the first published papers to present data from Periods 2 and 3. Despite the obvious importance for science of the direction of Genie's development after Curtiss (1977), neither article attempts to take up the story of Genie's language acquisition where the latter left off, or to describe or analyse systematically the state of Genie's linguistic system in Period 3. Nor does Curtiss give any details about Genie's life, behaviour or circumstances since the Summer of 1975.

The first of the two papers gives the following assessment of Genie's language development: When Genie began combining words, a gap between semantic and cognitive knowledge on the one hand and syntactic ability on the other became evident. Genie for the most part combined content words; an increase in sentence length largely consisted of an increase in the number of content words strung together and not of syntactic elaboration either by inclusion of grammatical markers or by an increase in hierarchical complexity. Thus, while over time sentences in Genie's speech have become longer, the development this signals has been mainly semantic; syntactic structure has changed little. The sentences Genie has produced are often rich and clear in semantic content (given the context), while they remain grammatically uninflected and telegraphic--i.e., syntactically primitive (Curtiss, 1979, p. 18).

This assessment accords with that in Curtiss e t al. (1978) but is more detailed. It involves two basic claims: that there was little (or no) increase in 'hierarchical complexity' in Genie's sentences, and that Genie's utterances are 'grammatically uninflected and telegraphic'. I submit that neither claim is consistent with the (1977) account. The second claim, relating to morphology and grammatical formatives, and already examined above, clearly contradicts the earlier account, since it ignores both her demonstrable progress in the acquisition of function words and morphology (see Table 2) and, crucially, the disparity between competence and performance. In fact, it is claimed in Curtiss (1977) that Genie's grammar had gone beyond the mere 'stringing together of content words' from as early as January 1972:

The use of the prepositions/n and on [from January 1972, cf, p. 153] represented the fast use of purely grammatical formatives (until their appearance, Genie's speech had consisted of content words alone); thus, in the expression of location a significant grammatical development had occurred (p. 154, my emphasis).

The first claim about hierarchical complexity is radically new since such an obvious lack of syntax was certainly not noted in Curtiss (1977). Curtiss (1979, p. 19, table 1) cites 13 utterances to support the claim, reproduced here in Table 4. The principle of selection of the data is unexplained and the utterances are very unevenly spaced over a time period of 5 years and 8 months from February 1972 to October 1977, with 9 of the 13 utterances from Period 1 (see Table 4).

268 PETER E. JONES

Date Utterance

Table 4

2/72 Cow tongue meat 7/72 No more ear hurt 4/73 I like hear music ice cream truck 10/73 Pretend trough horse 10/73 Live father house smell washcloth 1/74 After dinner use mixmaster 3/74 Like kick tire Curtiss car 5/74 Ball belong hospital 6/75 M not like rub hard 11/75 I want live back M house 12/75 Genie Mama have a father long time ago 12/76 Spool wind thread 10/77 Genie cry ride

Putting aside, for the moment, any methodological concerns about this use of data, Curtiss's claim about the lack of structural change is not obviously supported even on cursory inspection of the surface forms of these utterances. If we assume that the utterances 'cow tongue meat' (2/72) and ' I want live back M house' (11/75), for example, have a constituent structure along the lines of the sentences Curtiss gives as gloss ( 'A cow's tongue is meat' , 'I want to go back to M's house to live') then a comparison of the two reveals a considerable difference in hierarchical depth (see Fig. 1).

COW tongue meat

i I / / / ~ , .)\

./ / // I went live back M house

Fig 1.

This use of the syntactic patterns of adult sentences as a model for Genie's utterances is, of course, highly questionable, but it is a practice which Curtiss herself follows (see below).

However we might want to interpret the small data set in Table 4, nevertheless the main issue is that Curtiss's claim that Genie's syntactic structure 'changed little' and that there was little (or no) increase in hierarchical complexity in her sentences is incompatible with the (1977) account. Clearly, any differentiation of the sentence unit into major constituency or phrasal categories, and any internal differentiation within such phrasal categories themselves, will lead to an increase in 'hierarchical complexity'. Table I in fact charts the continuous development of such differentiation of and within major categories, as shown, for example, in the differentiation of 'all basic sentence constituents' from November 1971, in the differentiation within the NP category, within the predicate or VP, and within PP.

THE GENIE CASE.--A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 269

In addition to the facts of the matter, however, serious questions are also raised by the way data are used in Curtiss (1979) and in the post-(1977) account as a whole. Firstly, it is dangerous, for obvious reasons, to base conclusions on an individual 's overall linguistic competence from small sets of data, selected according to no obvious or consistent principle and consisting of isolated utterances abstracted from their discourse context and considered outside of an understanding of the qualitative developmental trends at work in the linguistic system as a whole. This point has part icular significance in the light of the competence-performance disparity in Genie ' s speech emphasized earlier. Secondly, one notes that in the 13 utterances in Table 4 there is a notable absence of the morphological elements and of certain grammatical formatives that Curtiss (1977) claims Genie had acquired. Furthermore, i f we compare Table 4 with Genie ' s ' leading edge ' utterances in Table 3 it appears that Genie was capable of more complex sentences than Table 4 would imply. The data in Table 4 seem, therefore, to have been carefully chosen merely to support the post- (1977) claims about the primitiveness of Genie ' s utterances and to create the impression of non- progression in Genie ' s language.

A second set of data is given in Curtiss (1979, p. 20, table 2) to exemplify a type of sentence Genie produced 'at t imes' and which Curtiss describes as 'not merely syntactically primitive ' but also 'grammatical ly i l l-formed, i.e., in direct violation of the adult grammar ' (ibid., p. 18). The data are reproduced in Table 5 with Curtiss 's dates and glosses.

Table 5

Date No. Utterance Gloss

1/72 a Angry burn stove

2/73 b Judy my finger caught door 9/73 c Finger is soak 1/74 d Boy is pinch 6/74 e Graduation to buy present

8/74 f Tissue paper blue rub face. Pound

9/74 g Driving locomotive man feed self ~ 4/74 h I supermarket surprise Roy

7/75 i Tomorrow R coming tomorrow Thursday 6/75 j I did not sad 10/77 k Do not through. I want through

Grandma got angry at me and said I'd get burned if I stayed by the stove Judy caught her finger in the door I had to soak my finger The boy pinched me At my graduation, people will buy me presents Father used to rub my face hard with blue tissue paper Men who drive locomotives feed themselves I was surprised to see Roy at the supermarket [no gloss] I am not sad That box is opaque. I want the kind you can see through

Curtiss uses these data to illustrate the alleged disparity between Genie ' s poor syntax and rich semantics, claiming that these utterances 'especial ly with shared contextual information, were semantically quite clear and elaborate ' (p. 18) despite their deficient syntax. Of the 11 utterances cited, only (i) and (k) are dated later than Period 2. Of the remaining nine, five (a, c, d, h, j ) are cited in Curtiss (1977) and it is interesting to compare her comments on these utterances there with the description in Curtiss (1979). Curtiss (1977) lists (a) with another five utterances which she describes as ' i l l - formed both syntactically and semantically' (p. 194, my emphasis). The six utterances in question have rather different properties but, according to Curtiss, far from being semantically clear, 'All fail to communicate any meaning they might at some level be attempting to encode' (ibid., my emphasis) and have no glosses. Utterances (c) and (d), on the other hand, were not spontaneous but were Genie's responses to explicit attempts to train her to produce various grammatical structures:

270 PETER E. JONES

Another type of nonsentence arose from attempts to teach Genie to use the copula. As with questions, Genie attempted to use the copula, even where inappropriate, in an effort to meet the demands upon her to 'speak in sentences' a command which to Genie meant to insert a form of be (1977, p. 164, my emphasis).

Curtiss in fact shows that many ('close to half', p. 165) of Genie's 'nonsentences' were utterances 'produced in response to intervention' (ibid.) and that, in the case of the forms with inappropriate copula, 'when the attempts at intervention were stopped, here again the resulting nonsentences disappeared from Genie's speech' (ibid.). Utterance (h) is listed as one of a group of 'nonsentences' which 'may all have had meaning for Genie; but to the adults around her these strings appeared to be, on the whole, meaningless combinations of independent one- or two-word sentences' (ibid., p. 163, my emphasis). Utterance (j) is cited as an 'inappropriate' use of dummy DO (ibid. p. 175). Utterance (b) is not recorded in Curtiss (1977) although there is a form 'Your finger caught door' , dated February 1973 (ibid., p. 173), cited to illustrate Genie's confusion over my and your. There are clear inconsistencies, then, between Curtiss's (1977) and (1979) interpretations of some of these utterances.

For completeness I reproduce in Table 6 a third data set, largely Period 3, from Curtiss (1979) showing, she claims, that in Genie's speech, 'syntactic form does not deteriorate because a topic is new or urgent' and that the 'gap between syntax and semantics persists even in the sentences Genie uses most frequently and in talking about her favorite and most discussed topics' (ibid.,

Table 6

Date Utterance Gloss

1/72 Round circle box I want a round box 8/74 Two big square pillow I want two big square pillows 8/77 Dark blue, light blue surprise square and [no gloss]

rectangle 8/77 Blue light and square I want a light blue square box 8/77 Think Mama I am thinking about Mama 8/77 Think about Mama love Genie I am thinking about my wish

that th~fact [sic] that Mama loves Genie I don't want a dark box for a prize Next time give me the kind you can see through [no gloss]

p. 18).

8/77 No want dark surprise 10/77 Next time through

10/77 I want big tall clear

Curtiss et al. (1979), while not concerned with an overview of Genie's linguistic development as such, gives a further, undated, set of utterances, reproduced in Table 7 below, which also appear to come from Period 3 (see Table 7).

Table 7

Think Mama (cf. Table 6) No more scratch self No want dark surprise (cf. Table 6) I want square, rectangle Grandma have dress Mama make dress I like green car Curtiss one blue car Jeni in blue car Genie is Claudine funny Big blue light blue box in the car I want work continued on next page

THE GENIE CASE---A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 271

Lotsa colors in the drawer in the room in the room Light blue square and light red Surprise blue square Light dark brown have Not like Darius Light and square rectangle Light and dark square Water think swim think swim (dated August 1977 in Curtiss, 1982, p. 289)

The sole descriptive or evaluative remark given is the comment that Genie 's utterances 'require relat ively s imple trees to describe (for the most part they involve the stringing together of constituents at the same hierarchical level)' (p. 143). This claim may or may not be true with respect to Genie 's language in Period 3, but, for reasons already outlined, it is certainly not true of Genie 's language in Period 1, i f Curtiss (1977) is to be believed. However, interestingly, they illustrate their point of view with the diagrams shown in Fig. 2 headed 'Tree representation of chi ld 's spontaneous utterance', which are given without comment as analyses of two of Genie 's utterances and which reflect the practice referred to above of interpreting Genie 's utterances as reduced forms of the corresponding adult utterance.

S

b ~ ~ t h e car

NP VP

/ V NP

I like green car Fig 2.

Curtiss (1981a), in a section headed 'Genie: Grammatical Defici t ' (p. 19), argues that Genie ' shows a profile of primit ive syntactic and morphological abili ty combined with relatively well- developed semantic abi l i ty ' (p. 21). On the face of it, this assessment would appear not to tally too wel l even with the account g iven in the same paper o f Gen ie ' s p rogress ive syntact ic development:

When Genie began combining words she produced mostly attributive structures, expressing possession, visual detail, and emotional states... As her utterances became longer, time adverbials appeared... She also began combining phrases, and expressed not only temporal relations.., but causal and conditional relations as well (p. 20).

For Curtiss, however, this counts not as syntac t ic development but s eman t i c development. She explains in a footnote:

Semantics is used here to refer to expression and comprehension of lexical meaning, meaning relations as expressed by word combinations (whether syntactically well formed or ill formed), and semantic/pragmatic notions of inference, assertion, and illocutionary force. No claim is made that Genie or any of the other cases being discussed has acquired a semantic system in a more formal sense, in which meaning is grammaticalized by specific linguistic structure (ibid.).

She then goes on to claim:

272 PETER E. JONES

Through all of the semantic [sic] development described above, coveting a period of several years, Genie has acquired very little syntax or morphology. There is practically no morphological elaboration in her utterances, such as use o f plural or possessive markers or auxiliary forms, and no employment of syntactic devices or operations such as relativization, pronominalization, or movement of constituents as in subject-auxiliary inversion for questions. In addition, Genie's language contains no demonstratives; no proforms such as third-person pronouns, wh question words, or relative markers; no conjunctions such as but or/f; and no auxiliary forms such as copulas or modals. What results is the stringing together of content words, often with rich and clear meaning but with little grammatical structure (p. 21, my emphases throughout).

As evidence, Curtiss gives 13 isolated utterances and 5 snippets of conversation between Genie and unidentified adults, all undated. The utterances are drawn from data sets cited in previous articles with the majority from Period 1 and only two, as far as I can tell, from Periods 2 and 3. The conversational snippets, designed to demonstrate Genie's 'understanding of illocutionary force, assertion, and inference' (p. 20), are from Period 1 between February 1972 and December 1974. Overwhelmingly, therefore, the data used to illustrate Curtiss's (1981 a) post-(1977) interpretation are taken from Period 1, i.e. from the data used to support the (1977) account.

Curtiss (1977), it is to be recalled, argued that 'exceptional utterances revealed that [Genie] had acquired much of the morphological machinery omitted from these "telegraphic" strings' (p. 197), in particular plural, possessive, and - ing forms, together with contractible copula and contractible auxiliary. Curtiss (1981 a), however, claims that there is 'practically no morphological elaboration in her utterances, such as use of plural or possessive markers or auxiliary forms' and 'no auxiliary forms such as copulas or modals ' . In terms of the (1977) account, the first claim is seriously misleading, to say the least, for reasons given earlier; the second claim ( 'no auxiliary forms') is s i m p l y f a l s e (cf. Table 2). While Curtiss (198 l a) presents a picture of Genie's developing word combinations as not semantic 'in a formal sense, in which meaning is grammaticalized by specific linguistic structure', earlier papers had argued that Genie had 'systematic ways of expressing syntactic and semantic relations' (Fromkin et al., 1974, p. 92, quoted above), and showed 'consistent and correct word order' (Curtiss e t al. , 1974, p. 531, quoted above). Furthermore, in Curtiss (1977) we find the following description of systematic connections between'syntax and semantics, suggesting that the overall picture of Genie's syntactic progress is being seriously misrepresented in Curtiss (1981a):

When the structure of an utterance involves sentence embedding or complementation, the semantic interrelationships increase in complexity and number because relationships between sentences (as well as between constituents within the individual sentences) are involved. Genie's utterances revealed this complexity when she began to produce complex sentences. Although, as before, much semantic material was sometimes deleted, these complex intra- and intersential relationships were overtly expressed in some of her sentences (p. 183).

A final point in relation to Curtiss (1981a) is that the term 'telegraphic' (sometimes in quotes), used in the (1977) account, has given way to the term 'agrammatic ' : ' In context, Genie 's utterances, though agrammatic, are clearly interpretable and unambiguous' (198 l a, p. 24). The term 'agrammatic' is used to refer to utterances consisting of strings of words between which there are no grammatical connections and is typically applied in the description of some types of non- fluent aphasic discourse. Crystal (1980, p, 143), for example, refers to the term as a loose designation for utterances with 'reduced and incomplete sentence structure'. I suggest that this term is inappropriate for a general characterization of Genie's utterances which, though arguably 'reduced' or ' telegraphic', do not lack grammatical structure and are not ' incomplete' . It is not clear whether Curtiss is implying that 'telegraphic' utterances are, by definition, 'agrammatic ' , but this is hardly a plausible proposition. 7 The question clearly requires clarification.

Curtiss (1981b) contains little of relevance to the present discussion but gives the following overall assessment which is both less definitive and less negative in tone than those just

THE GENIE CASE---A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 273

examined and implies that Genie's linguistic progress was still continuing at the time of writing:

During the last eight [sic] B years she has continued to progress linguistically, but even at this writing has limited and markedly impoverished linguistic ability (p. 151).

Curtiss (1982) gives a now familiar post-(1977) characterization of Genie's language: In her case we have strong evidence that despite a decade [sic] 9 of language-learning, Genie is limited to grammatically unelaborated or grammatically uninflected word strings (p. 306, my emphasis).

This assessment has already been examined and found to be incompatible with the (1977) account. Furthermore, of the 27 utterances which Curtiss cites in support of her arguments, two- thirds (18) are from Period 1 with one-third (9) from Periods 2 and 3. For completeness, the nine utterances are given in Table 8. Again, there is no explanation of the principles according to which the data have been selected, and no attempt to ground the utterances in the context of the systemic integrity of Genie's developing linguistic competence.

Date Utterance

12/76 8/77 8/77 9/77 9/77 10F/7 10F/7 11/77

Table 8

Spool wind thread (cf. Curtiss, 1979) Water think swim think swim Tummy water drink You draw standing Mama on stair Sick people lady driving ambulance I want I want big Mama toy Genie cry ride (of. Curtiss, 1979) Hot dog eat, eat the hot dog, eat hot dog

In addition to the general assessment cited above, Curtiss (1982) argues once more for a striking disparity between Genie's semantic and syntactic abilities. Specifically, she claims that while Genie 'is not impaired in the acquisition of lexical semantics' and that 'her lexical entries contain adult-like semantic feature specification', there is evidence for 'the absence of subcategorization information and the absence of consistent rules for mapping thematic relations onto subcategorization features or grammatical relations' (pp. 288-289). This evidence consists of eight utterances drawn from April 1972 to November 1977, including six of the nine utterances from Periods 2 and 3 in Table 8. Curtiss provides no evidence to show that these utterances are representative of Genie's output for the relevant periods. Even if they were, of course, the (1977) account would not be compromised since it is based wholly on data from Period 1. Certainly, the deficits she now argues for were not noted in the earlier account. Curtiss (1977), for example, states without qualification that 'it was evident that she had acquired strict subcategorization features for nouns, and adjectives' (p. 167).

Curtiss (1985) offers nothing new in the way of data or analysis but gives a particularly severe assessment of Genie's linguistic abilities whose substance has already been addressed:

Social isolation prevented Genie from acquiring language in childhood, and her language development as a teenager and young adult has been limited primarily to lexical and propositional semantics, with little acquisition o f structural (or computational) linguistic knowledge (p. 108, my emphasis).

Curtiss (1988a) continues in the same vein: Her acquisition of lexicon and the expression of meaning relations, including multi-propositionality, steadily progressed and increased. . . However, her ability to produce 'sentences' [her quotes!] developed only insofar as she was able to produce increasingly longer strings and strings that incw.asod in propositional complexity. In contrast, her utterances remained largely agrammatic and hierarchically f lat (p. 371, my emphasis).

274 PETER E. JONES

She herself provides no tree representations (as per Curtiss e t a l . , 1979) to support her arguments but gives, in evidence, 10 undated utterances (her (1)(a-j)). These are reproduced in Table 9 but with the dates (taken from the source articles) added, showing that the majori ty (7) are from Period 1.

Table 9

Date Utterance 4/73 I like hear music ice cream truck 1/74 After dinner use mixmaster 3H4 Like kick Curtiss tyre 5/74 Ball belong hospital 12/75? Genie Mama have father long time ago 8/77 Think about Mama love Genie 8/77 Dark blue, light blue surprise square and rectangle 5/75? Teacher say Genie have temper tantrum outside 5/75 Father hit Genie cry longtime ago 5/75 Genie have Mama have baby grow up

The substantive syntactic argument over hierarchical depth has already been dealt with above, but I would submit that these particular examples do not advance Curtiss 's case. To take just one of the examples, the complex sentence 'Teacher say Genie have temper tantrum outside' is one of a group which 'unequivocably involve embedding ' (Curtiss, 1977, p. 159) and could hardly, therefore, be characterized as 'hierarchically flat'.~°

Curtiss (1988a) is also particularly significant in being the only paper in the post-(1977) series to make even passing reference to Curtiss 's reinterpretation of Genie 's linguistic progress. She comments:

It appeared for a time that she also had learned English phrasal and clausal word order constraints. However, over the years, there were persistent, even increasing, violations of such constraints in production and persistent miscomprehension of word order (e.g., in reversible ~tives) (p. 370).

Despite the significance of this statement for the Genie case, it is not elaborated on or explained, and no evidence is provided in support of it. I f this statement is true, a number of questions immediately arise: at what point did Curtiss recognize that her interpretation of Genie ' s language development in the (1977) period was mistaken? Why is there no published reference to the need for such a revision prior to 19887 What data, presumably accumulating 'over the years ' , is Curtiss referring to, and where is it?

The crucial issue of clausal and phrasal word order constraints is taken up again in Curtiss (1988b) where evidence for Genie 's al leged deficit in this and other areas of grammar is presented. This is also the last paper to present and discuss data from the Genie case. We find the following assessment of Genie ' s overall development:

The linguistic--cognitive profile that emerged during the eight-plus [sic] a~ years Genie was studied, was one of good lexical and propositional semantic abilities alongside normal or relatively normal nonlinguistic cognitive function, contrasted with marked impairments in (1) psychosocial function, including the use of language for social purposes, and (2) acquisition of the grammar (1988b, p. 97).

She then proceeds to elaborate on (2): Even after more than eight [sic]a2 years of linguistic exposure and attempted acquisition, Genie's utterances remained largely agrammatic--they contained little and inconsistent use of inflectional morphology and other nonlexical grammatical markers, and were devoid of syntactic devices marking clausal relations or noncanonical sentence form (as in questions or topicalizations) (ibid.).

She concedes that 'Gen ie did evidence knowledge of some syntact ic fac ts ' , such as ' the subcategorization constraints for many (though not all) verbs ' , that 'she appeared sensitive to the

THE GENIE CASE---A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 275

constituent make-up and order of constituents in certain phrasal categories', and that she 'never attached bound morphology to the wrong syntactic category' (ibid., p. 98). Nevertheless, she claims that 'much of the grammar remained unacquired' (ibid.). In evidence, Curtiss presents 11 utterances (her (1)-(11), p. 98), listed without dates or source references, which 'illustrate the disparity between the lexical appropriateness and propositional clarity of her utterances on the one hand, and their unelaborated and ungrammatical form on the other' (ibid., p. 98). These are reproduced in Table 10 with source reference and date of utterance added, where I have been able to find them, but without Curtiss's gloss. The majority appear to date from Period 1.

Table I0

No, Utterance Date of utterance Source reference

1 Applesauce buy store 4/72 (1977, p. 180) 2 Man motorcycle have ? Not found 3 Tummy water drink 8/77 (1982, p. 289) 4 Want go ride Miss F. Car [sic] 5/73 (1977, p. 156) 5 Genie full stomach ? Not found 6 Genie bad cold live father house 10/73 (1982, p. 288) 7 Very angry Mrs L.V, house ? Not found 8 Want Curtiss play piano 8/7/74? (1977, p. 159) 9 Father hit Genie cry long time ago 5/75 (1977, p. 160) I0 Mama have baby grow up 5/2/74? (1977, p. 160)? I 1 Genie have Mama have baby grow up 5/75 (1977, p. 160)

Curtiss comments on these utterances as follows: Note the inconsistent and ungrammatical order of subject, verb, object in (1)-(5), the omission of obligatory constituents in all of the sentences, including main verbs in (5)-(7), and the lack of any device marking clausal relations in (8)-(11), all of this in contrast to the semantic clarity of these utterances, especially in context (ibid., p. 98).

Let us put to one side the theoretical and methodological implications of this avalanche of attitudinal negativity towards Genie's language and examine in turn the factual basis of these claims. The five utterances cited as evidence for 'inconsistent and ungrammatical order of subject, verb, object' are very widely spread in time, spanning a period of at least 5 years and 4 months (compare (1) and (3)) and possibly longer, depending on the dates of (2) and (5). Since Curtiss is clearly implying that this inconsistency of syntactic order was a feature of Genie's utterances at all stages of her linguistic development, it is important to compare this statement with findings from the (1977) period. This is what we find in Fromldn et al. (1974):

Her speech is rule-governed--she has fixed word-order of basic sentence elements and constituents (p. 92, my emphasis).

Noting an inability on Genie's part to understand the difference between active and passive sentences, the same authors comment:

This is particularly strange when compared with Genie's own utterances which show a consistent word order to indicate Subject Verb Object relations. While she never produces passive constructions, her active sentences always place the object after the verb and the subject before the verb (when they are expressed) (p. 93, my emphasis).

Curtiss et al. (1974) had the following to say: Genie has used consistent and correct word order (in terms of the adult model) to indicate SVO relations, as well as modification and possessive relations, in her own production (p. 531, my emphasis).

Curtiss (1977) assesses the situation as follows: Genie's utterances, like those of normal children acquiring English, follow strict word order: Modifier-Noun, Possessor-Possessed, Subject-Verb-Object, Preposition-Noun Phrase. There are exceptions to S -V-O order, but as with data on normal chi ldren. . , such order reversals are rare (p. 193, my emphasis).

In more formal terms, she notes (p. 167):

276 PETER E. JONES

In sentences, the order was consistently

Subj ect-Verb- ( (Cob~ei:ement t )

1 2 3 On this evidence, the inconsistency in word order which Curtiss (1988b) reports is a characteristic only of the data set she has chosen to present, and is far from typical of Genie's overall output. A count of all example utterances in Curtiss (1977) which could be construed as having either (S)-V-O or (S)-O-V order found approximately 270 of the former (including repetitions of the same example utterance) and only 4 of the latter.

Curtiss's second claim is that all 11 utterances illustrate 'the omission of obligatory constituents'. In fact, we note once more that the utterances cited in evidence do lack those grammatical elements Curtiss (1977) claimed that Genie had acquired, namely plural, possessive, 3rd-pers. sing, and -ing endings, Prepositions, and negation. This suggests that the 11 utterances have not been well selected as an illustration of the full picture of Genie's progress. 13 The claim also ignores both the striking competence-performance disparity discussed earlier as well as other peculiarities of Genie's discourse production, noted by Curtiss (1977):

Soon after normal children begin using structures, however, deleted elements decrease in number, and more and more of the basic constitutents of the sentence appear on the surface. Not so with Genie. Throughout the period of observation, Genie has continued to delete subjects, verbs, objects, whether redundant or recoverable (1977, p. 194).

And further: The second major difference between Genie's grammar and the grammars of normal children acquiring a first language is in the variability of rule application. Most of Genie's rules are optional; sometimes they apply, sometimes they do not. This variability in rule application, coupled with the preponderance of reduction and deletion, produces a surface syntax that often masks the underlying grammar (ibid., p. 196, my emphasis).

Thus, Curtiss (1977) demonstrates that Genie was able to acquire and to use appropriately what she later (1988b) refers to as 'obligatory constituents' (e.g. Determiners, Prepositions, AUX elements, have and be as main verbs) but she did not always produce them. Her third claim about 'the lack of any syntactic device marking clausal relations' is in accord with Curtiss (1977) but its significance is unclear, since inter-clausal relations are not always syntactically marked in adult varieties of English ('I told you I 'd be there'). In any case, one would have thought that the acquisition and production of complex multi-clausal sentence structures, conceded by Curtiss, would have been of rather more significance than the absence of complementizers. Curtiss's arguments seem to be based around an implication that a failure to master this or that aspect of the grammar of English represents a deficit in Language capacity (with a capital T).

The most recent statements by Curtiss repeat the essential points of the post-(1977) reassessment of Genie's language. As noted earlier, she claims that Genie 'never mastered the rules of grammar, never could use the little pieces--the word endings, for instance. She had a clear semantic ability but could not learn syntax' (Rymer, 1993, p. 160). A similar, if more detailed, assessment is given by Curtiss in an interview for the recent BBC Horizon documentary (BBC, 1994):

In Genie's case, the vocabulary was what she was good at, conveying messages is what she was good at, but if you look at a sentence that she would utter it wouldn't be grammatical. She might say things like: 'Spot chew glove', 'apple sauce by [sic] store', where the message was clear--you know, the dog, named Spot, chewed the glove, or we need apple sauce, we need to buy apple sauce at the store. But in both of these cases you can see they're not sentences of English. We wouldn't say 'apple sauce by [sic] store', we would say: 'We need to buy apple sauce at the store', or 'Apple sauce is what we want from the store', or something that is an actual sentence of English (p. 21).

THE GENIE CASE--A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 277

The two utterances cited ( 'Spot chew glove', 'Applesauce buy store') are from 8 December 1971 (1977, p. 146) andApri l 1972 (1977, p. 180), respectively, i.e. from within 1 year and 5 months of Genie's discovery in November 1970.

Rymer (1993) also discusses another crucial issue----~e question of Curtiss's reassessment of Genie's language development referred to earlier. The following exchange is cited:

When I asked Curtiss at what point Genie levelled out, she said, 'Almost immediately. But it took us several years to realize that' (p. 128, my emphasis).

The claim is not clarified or supported. What might Curtiss mean by 'almost immediately'? Some light is thrown on this in the discussion of the early optimism about Genie's potential:

In retrospect, the 1972 conference in Hawaii [Conference of the American Psychological Association in September 1972] seems the point at which the tide of optimism was taken at the f l o o d . . . It can be said, in looking back, that the prospects for Genie's eventual triumph were already clouding over that summer of 1972 (Rymer, 1993, pp. 12,1-125).

This important and interesting statement really needs to be clarified, but it must be stressed that no 'levelling off ' , immediate or otherwise, was noted in Curtiss (1977) based on the work with Genie up to the summer o f 1975, i.e. almost 5 years after her discovery. Moreover, the implication that the summer of 1972 marked a levelling off point is not supported by the continued and substantial progression in language acquisition after that point, as Curtiss (1977) shows, and as can be seen clearly from the position of the dashed lines in Tables 1 and 2 above. Moreover, David Rigler, at that time Genie's foster parent, wrote in a letter dated June 1975 that 'At age 18, Genie has not stopped her process of achievement in any sphere' (Rymer, 1993, p. 153). The levelling off story appears, therefore, to be uncorroborated, not to say completely contradicted, by the published facts of the case.

Genie after the summer of 1975 What did happen to Genie, and her language, after the summer of 1975? Rymer (1993) and BBC

(1994) both show that Genie's life circumstances took a dramatic turn for the worse. The most significant event is Genie's departure from the Rigler's home in June 1975 where she had developed steadily on all fronts over 4 years, following the rejection of Rigler's application for renewed funding of research on Genie. She was initially placed with her natural mother but her mother was unable to cope with Genie who then 'began an unhappy life in a series of foster homes' (BBC, p. 22). In some of these homes 'Genie was subjected to abuse, to punishment, to harmssment' (ibid.) and not only failed to progress but, by all accounts, regressed. As Rigler himself puts it: 'after she left us what we experienced was that she actually regressed, she went back to earlier stages' (p. 24, my emphasis). More specifically:

Genie's reaction to the regime [in the foster home] was to regress, seemingly intentionally, shedding by degrees the skills in comportment and communication that she had developed over the previous several years . . , she retaliated by becoming a recluse, only in this case she had only herself to lock away. She deprived the world of whatever she thought it wanted (Rymer, 1993, p. 155, my emphasis),

One particularly traumatic event produced devastating consequences: Genie's reaction to the trauma, as the scientists interpreted it, was to up the ante. If the world would go to that extreme to invade her sovereignty over her body, she would deprive it of something else,---something it had desired from her and rewarded her for. Forfive months she didn't speak (ibid., p. 156, my emphasis).

Genie was seen in early 1977 by John Miner (her then guardian), who commented that 'her behaviour was just not recognizable. She would not speak, would not say a word. She snapped at her food, as if she were a crocodi le . . . Her regression was just overwhelming' (Rymer, 1993, p. 157). Owing to her poor condition, Genie was hospitalized for 2 weeks in April 1977 and 'left the hospital for another foster home' with 'her speech and eat ing. . , partially improved' (p. 157).

278 PETER E. JONES

This new home fell apart towards the end of 1977 and Genie was placed in temporary accommodation over the Christmas holidays, then entered a new foster home. Curtiss wrote to Miner on 6 January 1978 that 'Genie is confused and traumatized by these frequent moves' (p. 182). Curtiss herself saw Genie for the last time on 3 January 1978 (ibid.).

These accounts suggest that there was quite enough happening in Genie's life to explain her failure to progress linguistically, without invoking the state and potential of Genie's brain. However, it must also be said that the post-(1977) account, according to which Genie's linguistic progress was halted at some (unspecified) point, has never been properly argued or substantiated. The few post-(1977) utterances cited by Curtiss (all of which are given above) cannot be considered as clear evidence of anything since the full corpus has never been published and there has been no attempt at an integrated, systematic account of Genie's language during Periods 2 and 3, taking into account, in particular, the competence-performance disparities discussed above. The extent of Genie's progress in language acquisition, therefore, remains, to this date, unknown.

Conclusion The above analysis shows that, if the (1977) account is reliable, the following post-(1977) claims

are either highly misleading or false:

(a) Genie was unable to acquire the morphology of English. (b) Genie was unable to acquire the syntax of English. (c) Genie's utterances remained uninflected and telegraphic. (d) Genie's utterances remained hierarchically fiat. (e) Genie's linguistic development levelled off during Period 1.

According to the (1977) account, Genie was able to acquire the morphology and syntax of English and was still in the process o f acquiring it when she was 18 years old.

It is possible, of course, that it is the post-(1977) account, and not the earlier account, that we should believe, i.e. that at some time between Curtiss (1977) and Curtiss et al. (1978), Curtiss came to regard her earlier account as wrong and produced a fresh, and quite different, assessment of the case. On the evidence of the published papers, however, this is hardly a credible scenario. At no time since the publication of Curtiss (1977) has she expressed the opinion that the conclusions of this work required reassessment or revision, still less oulright repudiation. Moreover, as we have seen, the post-(1977) account is not so much based on reanalysis or reinterpretation of the data but on a highly selective and misleading misrepresentation of the earlier findings. I submit, therefore that the discrepancies between the two accounts which have been identified here are genuine, far- reaching, and not merely apparent discrepancies. This state of affairs requires urgent clarification. In the meantime, it is clear that a definitive judgement on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given.

NOTES

Work began on this paper in 1992 with a small research project initiated by the author together with colleagues Karen Grainger and Brec'bed Piette. The research was carded out by Mark Neath and the findings were reported in Neath (1992). The project was funded by the Cultural Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University. The report findings were discussed in a paper given by the present author, 'Language Deprivation and the "Critical Period" Hypothesis', to the inaugural meeting of Sheffield Hallam University Language and Linguistics Group in January 1993. I would like to thank those who attended the meeting for their comments and encouragement, and particularly Karen Grainger, Keith Green, Jill Le Bihan and Ray Parker. Special thanks to Karen Gralnger for reading and commenting on the whole manuscript. This paper was written during a sabbatical semester funded by the Cultural Research Institute. 2 As revealed by BBC (1994), the tapes had decomposed and had to be restored.

THE GENIE CASE,---A FRESH LOOK AT THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 279

3 In my paper on Genie referred to in Note 1, I argued that this unusual profile, particularly when seen in the context of Genie's highly restricted communicative skills, could perhaps be accounted for in a more revealing way along functionalist, e.g. Hallidayan, lines, since the principal structural absences appeared to correlate well with the elements of Halliday's 'Interpersonal' system (of. Halliday, 1978, p. 119). " The importance and implications of this issue were raised by Ray Parker in comments made during the talk referred to in Note 1. s I have been unable to find this second piece of data in Curtiss (1977). There is, however, a very similar utterance 'I do not have a red pail' (p. 152) which is dated June 1975 and which includes the indefinite article, making the sentence less 'primitive' in surface appearance. In this same article there is an inaccuracy in the description of the distribution of 'Do- support' in Genie's speech. The authors claim that 'Do-support appears only in the rote~hase "I do not h a v e . . . " ' (p. 35, Footnote 2), while Curtiss (1977) claims a somewhat wider distribution for the element, stating that it 'has been used only in negative sentences, and only with the subject I or in memorized commands. It has been used both appropriately and inappropriately' (p. 175). Even this picture is contradicted, however, by two pieces of data she cites: (i) 'Do not like bird at school' (1977, p. 152); (ii) M: You wanta paint it, or are you trying to tell me you did paint it? G" Did paint' (p. 172). 6 This is the first instance, to my knowledge, of a 'reflexive' form occurring in Genie's speech. Curtiss (1977), although discussing Genie's apparent comprehension of such forms, does not include them in the list of pro-forms Genie used in production. 7 Exactly this proposition is, however, explicitly advanced in Rymer (1993, p. 126, my emphasis): 'four years after she was talking in strings she was still speaking in the abbreviated non-grammar of a telegram'. 3 This comment would seem to imply that Curtiss still had first-hand knowledge of Genie's progress up to November 1978 at least, which was not the case (cf. section 'The data'). 9 This comment would seem to imply that Curtiss had first-hand knowledge of Genie's progress up to at least November 1980; see Note 8. ~0 The utterance 'Teacher say Genie have temper tantrum outside' is not cited in Curtiss (1977), but we do find utterance (6) in Table 3, above: 'Teacher said Genie have temper tantrum outside', i.e. with 'inflected' main verb. Similarly, the utterance 'Genie Mama have father long time ago' is not be found elsewhere, yet Curtiss (1979) (see Table 4 above) gives 'Genie Mama have a father long time ago' with the 'article' present. These slips, if that is what they are, may be wholly innocent, of course, but the removal of verbal inflection and of the article do contribute to the impression that Genie was limited to 'telegraphic' speech. ~ See Note 8. ~2 See Note 8. ,3 Furthermore, in two cases it is possible to find utterances in Curtiss (1977) with the same lexico-grammatical structure as in Table 10 but more complex syntactically, e.g.

Utterance Date Source

I want Curtiss play piano [cf. (8), Table 10] 8/7/74 (1977, p. 159) Mama not have baby grow up [cf. (10), Table 10 5/2/75 (1977, p. 160)

R E F E R E N C E S

AITCHISON, J. 1989 The Articulate Mammal: an Introduction to Psycholinguistics, 3rd edn. Unwin Hyman, London.

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