At a very young age, children begin to understand the world around through observational learning where young children observe the actions of others and mimic them. In a famous study called the Bobo Doll experiment, children observed adults both verbally and physically abusing the doll. Later when the adults were not present the children who saw the agressive behavior reacted in a similar way. So it is clear that observation facilitates learning. But what if you did not have anything to observe, anyone to teach you; in other words what if you were never taught anything?
To begin let us discuss what it would be like if you were missing something as fundamental as language. Understandably this is a tricky thing to study because it’s incredibly immoral to isolate a person for the sake scientific research. But sometimes due to horrible circumstances, scientists are able to study the brains of children who have been raised with little or no human contact and the most famous of these feral children is Genie Wiley. Genie spent the first 13 years of her life locked away in a smal bedroom in her parents’ home. In 1970 her parents were charged with child abuse and Genie began rehabilitation with a team of psychologists linguists and scientists were using her experiences to answer the following question: if a person is deprived of language throughout their childhood, can they ever learn to be able to communicate well? At first the answer appeared to be yes, Genie quickly began to learn new words for objects around her and even say phrases with two or three words, similar to how toddlers speak.
However, from there her ability to communicate verbally was not improving. This is because she could not learn grammar which linguist Noam Chomsky believe seperate human language from the communication of animals. It appears that Genie passed a critical period of learning human language which is thought to end around puberty. Scientists have hypothsized that after a restricted development period where the nervous system is particularly sensitive to the effects of a certain experience, in this case language, it is nearly impossible to learn it. And the same effects have also been shown when hearing sign language after the critical period. Now, you are probably wondering why there is a critical period in the first place. According to Eric Lenneberg, the linguist to popularize the critical period hypothesis. The function of language tends to settle in the left hemisphere of the brain after the critical period. And it is thought that the brain loses some of its plasticity after this lateralization. So if you haven’t learned the language until after this point, it may be harder for your brain to learn the new material and sadly for Genie she was already past that point. However, Genie will never effectively be able to use language, she was ableto quickly learn other things such as how to use the toilet or dress yourself. Some things are still possible to learn by observation no matter the age at which they are introduced to them.
Trascripted By Benazir Elahee Munni