Ethical Issues In The Case Of Genie Case

There have been a number of cases of feral children raised in social isolation with little or no human contact. Few have captured public and scientific attention like that of young girl called Genie. The girl was given the name Genie in her case files to protect her identity and privacy. "The case name is Genie. This is not the person's real name.She spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated and abused for over a decade. Genie's case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test. The case is very important to researchers, due to the fact that cases such as Genie do not arise very often, and it is not ethical to create such subjects. There have been other cases similar to Genie’s such as Helen Keller
At the time of her arrival at Children’s Hospital, she was capable of producing only two utterances (“stop-it” and “no-more”). Adult-child interaction is a critical factor that contributes to the acquisition of language. Her inability to speak at the age of thirteen is evidence of the severe and extreme lack of adult-child interactions throughout her childhood years. Although Genie’s language acquisition was evaluated and therapeutically enhanced over a period of more than seven years subsequent to her discovery and the interventions that followed, Susan Curtiss (then a graduate student) noted after working with Genie that while Genie was “a very communicative person,” Genie “never mastered the rules of grammar” and that “she had a clear semantic ability but could not learn syntax”. Nor did Genie ever learn how to ask
Cognition, like language acquisition, is equally enhanced by the environment, and Genie’s hostile surroundings certainly thwarted her intellectual growth. Although she was already entering pubescence when she was admitted to Children’s Hospital, she functioned at the level of a “normal one year old”.Cognitive therapists propose that language is both a “product of cognitive organization and development” and “a consequence of cognitive maturation”.They also suggest that there “specific connections” between Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and the developmental stages of speech and language acquisition.The two phrases Genie used when she was first evaluated by professionals (“stopit” and “nomore”) indicate that Genie acquired these two utterances by imitating what she heard most consistently. She did not use them in a functional, imperative way, but rather, said them repeatedly “in a ritualized way”.
According to the Social Interactionist perspective, language acquisition depends upon both biology and a social environment. Children learn language because they want to “communicate with others”but also because of social interactions between the child and caregiver. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development collaborative learning, and scaffolding are all highlighted by the social interactionist as vital strategies in assisting