What happens if you are raised without language?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
Susan Curtiss [+ ]
UCLA
Susan Curtiss is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UCLA. She is the author of Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day ‘Wild Child’, as well as of close to one hundred journal articles and book chapters. She has also authored numerous language tests, including the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation (the CYCLE), used by researchers across the U.S. and overseas. Her research spans the study of language and mind, the ‘critical period’ for first language acquisition, Specific Language Impairment (SLI), mental retardation, epilepsy, adult aphasia, progressive dementia, the genetics of language, and language development following hemispherectomy (removal of one hemisphere of the brain) in childhood. Her current work focuses on mapping grammar onto the brain in normal and epileptic adults.
Description
Being deprived of language occasionally happens. The pattern shows that only those rescued in early in childhood from language deprivation developed an ability to speak. Those found after they were about nine years old learned only a few words, or failed to learn language at all.