First-Language Acquisition:
Wild and Isolated Children
It becomes interesting thing to know whether children would be
able to acquire the languages through experiencing it or they just
speak the original language of humankind. It is one of the
fundamental tasks of psycholinguistic to explain how children
learn the language which separated into two distinct: speech
production and speech comprehension. At birth we cannot
comprehend or produce speech, not up to the age of 4 years we all
learn the basics of our language. Although it just around passives,
elaborate syntactic structures, and bunch of vocabularies, at that
age they start to face and overcome the obstacles in language
learning. And this is true for children with whatever the languages
they have. However, still, there are some questions about: it is also
true to the isolated children? Would a child grown in total
isolation develop language? How about the critical age issues for
language learning occur towards them?
There are some theories which say that the language was inborn
and instinctive. In sixteenth century, Montaigne believed that
although children are not exposed to language, they still be able to
speak the language. Psammeticus, an Egyptian Pharoah during the
7th century also believed language that since birth children
isolated from any linguistic influences would develop the language
that they had been born with. He isolated two children, then it was
reported the children spoke a few words of Phyrgian, a language of
present day in Turkey. In the 15th century King James V of
Scotland did a similar experiment to children who speak Hebrew.
These studies gave the similar result. The children spoke the
language that it used in place where they were born. However,
some hypothesis also appear which say that human language tend
to be concerned with the origin of the first language, and were only
secondarily concerned with the precise way in which individual
infants acquire speech. It was Akbar, a mogul emperor of India,
desired to learn whether language was innate or acquired through
exposure to the speech of adults. He believed that language was
learned by people listening to each other and therefore a child
could not develop language alone. So he ordered a house built for
two infants and put a mute nurse to care for them. The children
did not acquire speech, which seemed to prove his hypothesis that
language is acquired and does not simply emerge spontaneously in
the absence of exposure to speech.
Then, how about the isolated children?
Isolated children or we could call it as a feral child is a human
child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very
young age, and has no or little experience of human care, loving or
social behavior, and, crucially, of human language. Some feral
children have been confined in isolation by other people, usually
their own parents. In some cases, this child abandonment was due
to the parents rejecting a child’s severe intellectual or physical
impairment. Feral children may have experienced severe child
abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away. They
are lack the basic social skills that are normally learned in the
process of enculturation or the process by which an individual
adopts the behavior patterns of the culture in which he or she is
immersed. They almost always have impaired language ability and
mental function. These impairments highlight the role of
socialization in human development. The impaired ability to learn
language after having been isolated for so many years is often
attributed to the existence of a critical period for language
learning, and is taken as evidence in favor of the critical period
hypothesis. It is theorized that if language is not developed, at
least to a degree, during this critical period, a child can never
reach his or her full language potential. The fact that feral children
lack these abilities pinpoints the role of socialization in human
development.
Consider, for example that become the tragic history is the case of
Genie. She was deprived not only of language input, but also of
any sort of love or normal parental care. She most certainly had
delayed and permanent problems with her language ability. She
also had many other developmental delays. She lacked true
grammar, but all this example shows us that full language
development may require language input, it is also possibly
requires human interaction and nurturing, the development of
other cognitive abilities, a healthy diet and others.
These are other examples of isolated and feral children:
1. Russian Bird-Boy
Date found: 2008–2–29
Age when found: 7
Location: Kirovsky, Volgograd, Russia
Years in confinement: 7
Apparently this boy was raised by his mother in a tiny-two room
apartment surrounded by bird cages. Confined in this apartment
since birth, he never learned to speak. Instead, he chirps like a
bird. The boy was fed and cared for by his mother, but was never
spoken to. After being rescued from his home in Kirovsky,
Volgograd, Russia by social workers, he was taken into care.
2. Jason Lopez
Date found: 2008–4–3
Age when found: 9
Location: López Arellano, Honduras
Years in confinement: 4
Jason was confined to a room by his parents between the ages of 4
and 9, when he was finally freed. In that time he was fed very little,
so that by the time he was released he was about the size of a two-
year-old and weighed 8 kg. Jason can’t speak, and can’t walk. The
room he was confined to was dark, and he was dressed only in a
disposable nappy.
In the cases of Victor and Wild Peter are not clear whether
problems with development were caused by them being
abandoned or they were abandoned because their parents were
struggling to cope with children with special needs. One report
suggests that Jason Lopez was confined because he could not walk
or talk. Although a neighbor could hear the moans of a child over a
period of several years, she has been assured by the parents that
Jason was OK. About a year before Jason was freed, she said, the
moaning had stopped. People who knew about Jason didn’t
intervene because they were afraid that Jason’s family would carry
out some sort of revenge attack. In the end, Jason was rescued
because someone knew that nobody else was in the house.
3. Houston Attic-Boy
Date found: 2007
Age when found: 13
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Years in confinement: 13
This boy had been locked in an attic where he was starved. When
he was found, he was the size of a 7-year-old. He’d been fed only a
liquid diet supplement. Four other children living in the home of
Geneva Foster, his mother, and Michael Ryan, his stepfather, had
not been abused. In addition to being starved, the boy also showed
signs of physical abuse when he was rescued from the house in the
Houston area of Texas, USA.
4. Rochom P’ngieng, Cambodian Jungle Girl
Date found: 2007–1–13
Age when found: 27
Location: Cambodia
Years in the wild: 19
She lost in the Cambodian jungle for eight years. Rochom P’ngieng
was lost in the Cambodian jungle at the age of eight when herding
buffalo with her six-year-old sister who also disappeared. She was
discovered on 13 January 2007 after a villager noticed some of his
food had been taken. He staked out the area and sighted a naked
woman stealing his rice.
She was captured by villagers. She was unable to speak any
intelligible language. She was recognized by her father, policeman
Ksor Lu long, because of a scar on her back. Her parents have
apparently agreed to a DNA test so her identity can be confirmed.
Subsequently, the family changed their mind. Further suspicion
was aroused by stories of a naked man seen with the woman, and
marks on her wrists as if she’d been bound. Apparently, she didn’t
like to wear clothes, shower, or use chopsticks at first, and is thus
having difficulty re-adjusting to normal life.
5. Jeffrey Baldwin
Date found: 2002–11–30
Age when found: 6
Location: Toronto, Canada
Years in confinement: 5
Jeffrey Baldwin was confined to his room for years by his maternal
grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, who were
both sentenced to life imprisonment on 10 June 2006. Jeffrey died
at the age of 6, when he weighed just 21 pounds and stood just 37
inches tall.
6. Bello, the Nigerian Chimp Boy
Date found: 1996
Age when found: 2
Location: Nigeria
Years in the wild: 1
He was abandoned by his parents. Bello, the Nigerian Chimp Boy
was found in 1996, at the age of about two. Both mentally and
physically disabled, he had probably been abandoned by his
parents at the age of about six months, a common practice with
disabled children among the Fulani, a nomadic people who range
great distances over the West African Sahel region. Bello was
found with a chimpanzee family in the Falgore forest, 150 km
south of Kano in northern Nigeria. When the story reached the
news agencies some six years later in 2002, Bello had been living
at the Tudun Maliki Torrey home in Kano. Bello exhibits feral
characteristics. When first discovered, Bello walked like a
chimpanzee, using his legs but dragging his arms on the ground.
He would leap about at night in the dormitory, disturbing the
other children, smashing and throwing things. Six years later Bello
was much calmer, but would still leap around in a chimpanzee-like
fashion, make chimpanzee-like noises, and clap his cupped hands
over his head repeatedly. Bello died in 2005.
These are what we get learned from those examples:
When a child is deprived of any human and humane contact,
they end up with a very impoverished linguistic system as well
as delayed development of all cognitive abilities.
When a child is provided with general attempts to
communicate or normal interactions with people even absent
language, they develop a relatively sophisticated linguistic
system.
When a child is provided with linguistic input, they learn
their native language normally in a way that almost seems like
magic.
It is important to note that all these children found it hard to
integrate into society, and it’s easy to understand why. There is a
critical age in which human language and interactions are
developed and after that it becomes much harder to develop these
skills. Passed that age, which is puberty, if one has not learned to
talk in a certain language passed puberty then it will be way more
difficult for that individual to acquire language and almost
impossible to truly master it. Researchers in the field are debating
over if language acquisition is more of a natural or nurture
influence. If the hypothesis is proven true, it would mean that
language acquisition is linked to age which means that individuals
acquire language through experiences, which would be a nurture
influence to the individual. The opposite case would have had a
natural influence. The critical period hypothesis has proven to be
true in the case of feral children. Therefore, in that case, language
acquisition is linked to age, which means that if one begins to
learn how to speak after puberty, and then their chances of
mastering a language are very low. In fact, acquiring language
before puberty helps individuals to develop basic communication,
social skills and sense of belonging, and emotional and intellectual
developments. Through the cases of feral children such as Oxana
Malaya, a girl with a dog-like behavior, Genie, a girl that was
isolated and tied up to a potty chair for over ten years, and Victor
of Aveyron, a boy that lived in the wild for most of his childhood,
we can see how the lack of language has affected their lives.
In conclusion, we could emphasize on the importance for language
acquisition for a child’s develop. Usually people take language as a
biological feature that human have and take it for granted.
However, by those three examples one can see that lack of
language can not only affect a child in a short-term basis, but also
during his whole life.
