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While 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 Genie Wiley.

Genie spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated, and abused for over a decade. Her case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test. Could a child reared in utter deprivation and isolation develop language? Could a nurturing environment make up for a horrifying past?

Who Was Genie Wiley?

In order to understand Genie's story, it is important to look at what is known about her early life, the discovery of the abuse she had endured, and the subsequent efforts to treat and study her.

Early Life (1957-1970)

Genie's life prior to her discovery was one of utter deprivation. She spent most of her days tied naked to a potty chair, only able to move her hands and feet. When she made noise, her father would beat her. The rare times her father did interact with her, it was to bark or growl. Genie Wiley's brother, who was five years older than Genie, also suffered abuse under their father.

Discovery and Study (1970-1975)

Genie's story came to light on November 4, 1970, in Los Angeles, California. A social worker discovered the 13-year old girl after her mother sought out services for her own health. The social worker soon discovered that the girl had been confined to a small room, and an investigation by authorities quickly revealed that the child had spent most of her life in this room, often tied to a potty chair.

A Genie Wiley documentary was made in 1997 called "Secrets of the Wild Child." In it, Susan Curtiss, PhD, a linguist and researcher who worked with Genie, explained that the name Genie was used in case files to protect the girl's identity and privacy.

Both parents were charged with abuse, but Genie's father died by suicide the day before he was due to appear in court, leaving behind a note stating that "the world will never understand."

The story of Genie's case soon spread, drawing attention from both the public and the scientific community. The case was important, said psycholinguist and author Harlan Lane, PhD, because "our morality doesn't allow us to conduct deprivation experiments with human beings; these unfortunate people are all we have to go on."

With so much interest in her case, the question became what should be done to help her. A team of psychologists and language experts began the process of rehabilitating Genie.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) provided funding for scientific research on Genie's case. Psychologist David Rigler, PhD, was part of the "Genie team" and he explained the process.

Genie's rehabilitation team also included graduate student Susan Curtiss and psychologist James Kent. Upon her initial arrival at UCLA, Genie weighed just 59 pounds and moved with a strange "bunny walk." She often spat and was unable to straighten her arms and legs. Silent, incontinent, and unable to chew, she initially seemed only able to recognize her own name and the word "sorry."

Genie Wiley's Rehabilitation and the Forbidden Experiment

She soon began to rapidly progress in specific areas, quickly learning how to use the toilet and dress herself. Over the next few months, she began to experience more developmental progress but remained poor in areas such as language. She enjoyed going out on day trips outside of the hospital and explored her new environment with an intensity that amazed her caregivers and strangers alike.

Curtiss suggested that Genie had a strong ability to communicate nonverbally, often receiving gifts from total strangers who seemed to understand the young girl's powerful need to explore the world around her.

After an outbreak of measles, Genie was quarantined at her teacher's home. Butler soon became protective and began restricting access to Genie. Other members of the team felt that Butler's goal was to become famous from the case, at one point claiming that Butler had called herself the next Anne Sullivan, the teacher famous for helping Helen Keller learn to communicate.

Genie was partially treated like an asset and an opportunity for recognition, significantly interfering with their roles, and the researchers fought with each other for access to their perceived power source.

Eventually, Genie was removed from Butler's care and went to live in the home of psychologist David Rigler, where she remained for the next four years. Despite some difficulties, she appeared to do well in the Rigler household. She enjoyed listening to classical music on the piano and loved to draw, often finding it easier to communicate through drawing than through other methods.

Recap

State Custody (1975-Present)

NIMH withdrew funding in 1974, due to the lack of scientific findings. Linguist Susan Curtiss had found that while Genie could use words, she could not produce grammar. She could not arrange these words in a meaningful way, supporting the idea of a critical period in language development.

Rigler's research was disorganized and largely anecdotal. Without funds to continue the research and care for Genie, she was moved from the Riglers' care.

In 1975, Genie returned to live with her birth mother. When her mother found the task too difficult, Genie was moved through a series of foster homes, where she was often subjected to further abuse and neglect.

Genie's birth mother then sued the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and the research team, charging them with excessive testing. While the lawsuit was eventually settled, it raised important questions about the treatment and care of Genie. Did the research interfere with the girl's therapeutic treatment?

Psychiatrist Jay Shurley visited her on her 27th and 29th birthdays and characterized her as largely silent, depressed, and chronically institutionalized. Little is known about Genie's present condition, although an anonymous individual hired a private investigator to track her down in 2000 and described her as happy. But this contrasts with other reports.

Genie Wiley Today

Why Was the Genie Wiley Case So Famous?

Part of the reason why Genie's case fascinated psychologists and linguists so deeply was that it presented a unique opportunity to study a hotly contested debate about language development.

Essentially, it boils down to the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Does genetics or environment play a greater role in the development of language?

Nativists believe that the capacity for language is innate, while empiricists suggest that environmental variables play a key role. Nativist Noam Chomsky suggested that acquiring language could not be fully explained by learning alone.

Instead, Chomsky proposed that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to learn the language at a remarkable pace.

Critical Periods

Linguist Eric Lenneberg suggests that like many other human behaviors, the ability to acquire language is subject to critical periods. A critical period is a limited span of time during which an organism is sensitive to external stimuli and capable of acquiring certain skills.

According to Lenneberg, the critical period for language acquisition lasts until around age 12. After the onset of puberty, he argued, the organization of the brain becomes set and no longer able to learn and use language in a fully functional manner.

Genie's case presented researchers with a unique opportunity. If given an enriched learning environment, could she overcome her deprived childhood and learn language even though she had missed the critical period?

Despite scoring at the level of a 1-year-old upon her initial assessment, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary. She started by learning single words and eventually began putting two words together much the way young children do. Curtiss began to feel that Genie would be fully capable of acquiring language.

Did Genie Learn to Speak?

After a year of treatment, Genie started putting three words together occasionally. In children going through normal language development, this stage is followed by what is known as a language explosion. Children rapidly acquire new words and begin putting them together in novel ways.

Unfortunately, this never happened for Genie. Her language abilities remained stuck at this stage and she appeared unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way. At this point, her progress leveled off and her acquisition of new language halted.

Of course, Genie's case is not so simple. Not only did she miss the critical period for learning language, but she was also horrifically abused. She was malnourished and deprived of cognitive stimulation for most of her childhood.

Researchers were also never able to fully determine if Genie had any pre-existing cognitive deficits. As an infant, a pediatrician had identified her as having some type of mental delay. So researchers were left to wonder whether Genie had experienced cognitive deficits caused by her years of abuse or if she had been born with some degree of intellectual disability.

Ethical Concerns

There are many ethical concerns surrounding Genie's story. Arguments among those in charge of Genie's care and rehabilitation reflect some of these concerns.

"If you want to do rigorous science, then Genie's interests are going to come second some of the time. If you only care about helping Genie, then you wouldn't do a lot of the scientific research," suggested psycholinguist Harlan Lane in the NOVA documentary focused on her life.

In Genie's case, some of the researchers held multiple roles of caretaker-teacher-researcher-housemate. which, by modern standards, we would deem unethical. For example, the Riglers benefitted financially by taking Genie in (David received a large grant and was released from certain duties at the children's hospital without loss of pay). Butler also played a role in removing Genie from the Riglers' home, filing multiple complaints against him.

"I think future generations are going to study Genie's case not only for what it can teach us about human development but also for what it can teach us about the rewards and the risks of conducting 'the forbidden experiment,'" Lane explained.

Bottom Line

Genie Wiley's story perhaps leaves us with more questions than answers. Though it was difficult for Genie to learn language, she was able to communicate through body language, music, and art once she was in a safe home environment. Unfortunately, we don't know what her progress could have been had adequate care not been taken away from her.

Ultimately, her case is so important for the psychology and research field because we must learn from this experience not to revictimize and exploit the very people we set out to help. This is an important lesson because Genie's original abuse by her parents was perpetuated by the neglect and abandonment she faced later in her life. We must always strive to maintain objectivity and consider the best interest of the subject before our own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Genie Wiley now?

Genie, now in her 60s, is believed to be living in an adult care facility in California. Efforts by journalists to learn more about her location and current condition have been rejected by authorities due to confidentiality rules. Curtiss has also reported attempting to contact Genie without success.

Why wasn't Genie Wiley's mother prosecuted?

Along with her husband, Irene Wiley was charged with abuse, but these charges were eventually dropped. Irene was blind and reportedly mentally ill, so it is believed that Genie's father was the child's primary caretaker. Genie's father, Clark Wiley, also abused his wife and other children. Two of the couple's children died in infancy under suspicious circumstances.

What have we learned from Genie Wiley?

Genie's story suggests that the acquisition of language has a critical period of development. Her case is complex, however, since it is unclear if her language deficits were due to deprivation or if there was an underlying mental disability that played a role. The severe abuse she experienced may have also affected her mental development and language acquisition.

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Who Was Genie Wiley? The Story of a Child Deprived of Nearly All Human Contact

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Genie Wiley was an isolated and abused child discovered by a social worker. Psychologists studied her to learn about language development. Learn what they uncovered.

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Seeking to disprove Noam Chomsky's contention that only humans could make sentences, Columbia researchers in the 1970s taught sign language to Nim Chimpsky. Credit... Harry Benson

TALKING animals are a dime a dozen in animated blockbusters. But what about the real thing? And what, for that matter, would it mean for an animal to talk? What indeed separates an animal from a human? These are a few of the questions raised in a new documentary about the life of a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, the subject of a radical language experiment in the 1970s. "Project Nim," which opens Friday in New York and Chicago and will be shown next year on HBO, is named after the study, which began in 1973 with an infant Nim living with an Upper West Side family and ended after much trial and tribulation in a Texas animal sanctuary, where he died in 2000.

"It was a very interesting challenge formally to make a documentary devoted only to the life story of an animal," said James Marsh, the director, whose 2008 documentary "Man on Wire," about Philippe Petit, the World Trade Center tightrope walker, won an Oscar. "And like any biography, you focus on one life, and you encounter many other lives in the slipstream of that life." Thus the film quickly becomes as much about the human emotions surrounding its star as it is about Nim.

The travails of Nim are revealed through disarming interviews, archival footage and elliptical re-enactments. A skilled interviewer though not seen or heard, Mr. Marsh elicits a remarkably candid accounting by the project's participants of steps and missteps during the chimpanzee's life, including from Herbert Terrace, the ambitious Columbia professor who arranged for Nim to be raised like a child, and Stephanie LaFarge, his former student, who took the ape into her household of seven children and a husband.

Among the other passionate personalities are Laura-Ann Petitto, the cheerful college student who was given the task of taking over Nim's education at a Columbia-owned estate in the Bronx when he outgrew apartment life, and Bob Ingersoll, Nim's companion after his abrupt move in 1977 to the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma following Dr. Terrace's decision to pull the plug on the experiment. Project Nim, recounted in Elizabeth Hess's 2008 book "Nim Chimpsky, the Chimp Who Would Be Human," was intended as a flamboyant salvo in the battles over nature versus nurture. Nim's name was a sly nod to the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, who had maintained that full-fledged language use was innate only to humans. By having Nim learn sign language, Dr. Terrace aimed to show that Nim could form complete sentences and move beyond past experiments with apes. With the LaFarges and under more structured training later, Nim learned upward of 125 signs and expressed himself in a mix of American Sign Language and coinages.

The astonishing gaps in preparation under Dr. Terrace's stewardship push science to the background of a story of hubris and crosscurrents of desire, altruism and power. Mr. Marsh suggests parallels between the animal and human worlds. Nim, growing older, naturally becomes more aggressive, to the point of tearing into one caretaker's face, while Dr. Terrace emerges as a fickle project leader who is compared to an "absentee landlord" and is romantically involved with Ms. Petitto. "One of the first things you learn about with chimpanzees is they have a very precise power structure within a group," Mr. Marsh said. "The males are constantly seeking dominance. Then in the human world you have this given power structure of the experiment. The professor is very much at the top, and underneath him are women - younger, less experienced women."

The experiment shows more about the experimenters than about Nim, who resists being a cuddly subject.

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Nim Chimpsky with two of his instructors, Bill Tynan and Joyce Butler. Credit... Herbert Terrace, Roadside Attractions/HBO Documentary Films

"I got a lot of calls from people who were interested in making cute chimp movies, and it's not a cute chimp story," said Ms. Hess, who was a consultant on "Project Nim." "One thing I love about the film is that James refused to sentimentalize Nim in any way." ("Project Nim" differs from Ms. Hess's book by, among other things, omitting mention of Bruno, an earlier chimp housed with Ms. LaFarge.)

One of Nim's most ardent supporters (among stiff competition) was Mr. Ingersoll, an effusive student in the University of Oklahoma psychology department who worked with Nim for several years.

"I consider Nim my best friend in my whole life," Mr. Ingersoll said by phone from Scotland, where he was helping present "Project Nim" at Edinburgh's annual film festival. "He was fun, open, accessible in the way that some other chimps weren't so accessible. Nim let his guard down real quick and let you access him."

During his years on the East Coast, Nim had already captured the imagination of outside observers, landing on the cover of New York magazine and appearing on "Sesame Street" and even in the pages of High Times, thanks to a habit the chimp picked up in the LaFarge household that persisted after his move to Oklahoma.

"We smoked weed with him occasionally," Mr. Ingersoll said, explaining the joint passing in terms of simian social dynamics. "When you do something and he's not included, he knows it." (As Ms. LaFarge's daughter Jenny puts it in the film: "It was the '70s.") But the amusing detail of Nim's humanlike behavior belies his unfortunate existence: stuck in a no man's land where he was raised like a boy but was shuttled about and confined like a beast. "Terrace says - not in the film but in the interview - 'If I taught him language, I could control him.' And that was very revealing: language as control, not language as communication," Mr. Marsh recalled. (Dr. Terrace ultimately argued that Nim was merely imitating appropriate responses rather than forming sentences.)

Reflecting on Nim's story Mr. Marsh compared it to the tradition of the picaresque novel. (He studied Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson for a student thesis.) But is his heartbreaking and absurd tale closer to Richardson's "Pamela" or Fielding's travesty "Shamela"?

"There's comedy and there's satire implicit in the story," he said. "But I'm not sure who the joke's on. I think it's ultimately on the chimpanzee."

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An Experiment That Evolved Into a Tragedy (Published 2011)

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TALKING animals are a dime a dozen in animated blockbusters. But what about the real thing? And what, for that matter, would it mean for an animal to talk? What indeed separates an animal from a human?

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The famed parrot Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words. Kosik the elephant learned to "speak" a bit of Korean by using the tip of his trunk the way people whistle with their fingers. So it's puzzling that our closest primate cousins are limited to hoots, coos, and grunts. For decades, monkeys' and apes' vocal anatomy has been blamed for their inability to reproduce human speech sounds, but a new study suggests macaque monkeys-and by extension, other primates-could indeed talk if they only possessed the brain wiring to do so. The findings might provide new clues to anthropologists and language researchers looking to pin down when humans learned to speak.

"This certainly shows that the macaque vocal tract is capable of a lot more than has previously been assumed," says John Esling, a linguist and phonetics expert at the University of Victoria in Canada, who was not involved with the work.

The study's lead author, William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna, says the question of why monkeys and apes can't speak goes back to Darwin. (Yes, Fitch is the great-great-great-grandson of U.S. Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.) Darwin thought nonhuman primates couldn't talk because they didn't have the brains, he says. But over time, anthropologists instead embraced the idea that the primates' vocal tracts were holding them back: They simply lacked the flexibility to produce the wide range of vowels present in human speech. That remains the "textbook answer" today, Fitch says.

He and study co-author Asif Ghazanfar, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suspected Darwin had it right. So they trained Emiliano, a long-tailed macaque at Princeton's primate lab, to sit in a chair while they shot x-ray video of him eating, yawning, and making a variety of vocalizations and lip smacks.

Analyzing x-ray stills from the video, the team assembled a collection of 99 different configurations of Emiliano's vocal tract, which is the open space sound flows through as it emerges from the larynx, then flows over the tongue and out the lips. "Essentially, we built up a model of all the possible things the monkey's vocal anatomy could do," Fitch says.

Next, the researchers employed a series of linguistic tools that measure which configurations of the lips, tongue, and larynx can produce the frequencies that correspond to various vowel sounds. Some languages have fewer than five vowels, the most common number, but vowels are essential to human speech. Calculating the macaque's so-called "vowel space," Fitch and Ghazanfar discovered that-at least theoretically-he, too, could produce five distinctive vowels, roughly equivalent to the A, E, I, O, and U in English.

Finally, the researchers input Emiliano's vocal tract configurations into a computer program that simulates vowel and consonant production given different anatomical settings. They picked a phrase that would show off a wide vowel range, "Will you marry me?" and ran it through a simulation of the monkey's vocal tract. Compared with a human, the simulated monkey's voice sounds flat and gravelly, but the words are clear and comprehensible. (You can listen below.)

The results suggest that, anatomically speaking, macaques are perfectly well equipped for humanlike speech, the researchers report today in Science Advances. And because their vocal anatomy is nearly identical to that of other monkeys and apes-and to most other mammals-these animals are "speech-ready," too, Fitch says.

So why can't Emiliano shoot the breeze with his handlers? Monkeys and apes lack the neural control over their vocal tract muscles to properly configure them for speech, Fitch concludes. "If a human brain were in control, they could talk," he says, though it remains a bit of a mystery why other animals can produce at least rudimentary speech.

At some point in the 8 million or so years since we diverged from chimpanzees, our closest living evolutionary relatives, human brains gained substantial control over the vocal tract, Fitch say. Anthropologists who scour the fossil record for evidence of when our hominin ancestors learned to speak are "wasting their time," he says, because all human ancestors had vocal anatomies capable of speech. Instead, the field should focus on genetic factors, like the FOXP2 gene, known to be necessary for proper speech and language development, to figure out when humans gained the gift of gab.

Dan Dediu, a psycholinguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, says the study's results open new doors for investigating modern languages, as well. He thinks slight population-level differences in vocal anatomy could explain why various languages have different phonetic and phonological properties. "Even a monkey's vocal tract can support spoken language, but its fine [anatomical] details might determine what sort of spoken language actually emerges," he says. "I might even think about adding to my simulations a monkey vocal tract and see what one gets."
For more related coverage on our furry friends, visit our animal world topic page.

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Why monkeys can't talk-and what they would sound like if they could

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The famed parrot Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words. Kosik the elephant learned to "speak" a bit of Korean by using the tip of his trunk the way people whistle with their fingers. So it's puzzling that our closest primate cousins are limited to hoots, coos, and grunts.

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Starved, tortured, forgotten: Genie, the feral child who left a mark on researchers

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More than four decades after she appeared in a Los Angeles County welfare office, her fate is unclear – but she has changed the lives of those who knew her

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Sign Activity of Mammals as Means of Ecological adaptation

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Scientific research constantly gives glimpses into new dimensions of animal cognition. But intelligence-which is so complex and encompasses such a wide range of adaptive abilities-remains confoundingly tricky to measure.

"One of the biggest challenges is our inability to comprehend how other species process information," says Kristina Horback, an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, who studies the cognitive abilities of livestock animals.

Some animals have senses we can't even understand, such as sharks, which have an acute sensitivity to electrical currents, or insects, some of which can see ultraviolet light.

Our own senses skew how we perceive intelligence in animals. The "mirror test"-an animal's ability to recognize itself in the mirror-is commonly used to assess capacity for self-awareness. Bottlenose dolphins, magpies, and manta rays are among the few species that have passed that test.

Because vision is key to humans, "it makes sense that visual recognition of the self would be our default," Horback says. "But what about species that rely on smell for identification, like swine? Visual information is not important to these species." Because the mirror test favors species that rely on vision over scent, it doesn't offer an objective measure of self-awareness.

We can't meaningfully compare intelligence among animals. One species might excel in one area but perform poorly in another and vice versa. And so much of an animal's ability to pass a cognition test depends on its sensory abilities. Using human abilities as a comparative benchmark reveals the drawbacks of our attempts to measure intelligence across species.

"Our vision is good, but not as good as hawks. Our hearing is good, but not as good as rats," says Edward Wasserman, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa who compares cognitive abilities among species. Our sense of smell, he says, is on the poor side, "and dramatically outclassed by dogs."

As Wasserman puts it, "How we contrive tests of intelligence may tell us more about the sensory abilities of animals than their intellectual abilities."

Add to that our tendency to value cognitive abilities that are human-like as evidence of higher intelligence. "Many people say, 'I hear that pigs are smart, and sheep are dumb,'" Horback says. "This is completely false." Pigs, like humans, are opportunistic omnivores-they eat whatever they can find. They've evolved the ability, she says, to remember food locations and to use deception to keep other pigs away from their stashes. Sheep, on the other hand, are grazers. They have different skills, such as the ability to detect subtle flock movements. "They do not need to solve complex food mazes or trick others away from food source," Horback says. "It just does not make sense for sheep to have that particular cognitive skill."

Every species is adapted to its own environment. Animals generally have the cognitive abilities necessary to thrive. "There are species which simply do not need to retain the capacity for complex problem solving [or] tool use," Horback says, pointing out that having more cognitive abilities than necessary "would be wasteful for the animal's survival."

"Barnacles do not move. Food comes to them," Wasserman says. "Why should they engage in great feats of learning or reasoning?"

Although scientists reject the notions of measures of absolute or comparative intelligence in animals, advances in technology are providing new insights.

Touchscreens in particular are "proving to be a real game changer," Wasserman says. "So long as animals can activate the screen by touching, nosing, or pecking, we can craft clever tests of their intelligence."

Here are 14 species from the animal kingdom that have demonstrated notable cognitive feats.

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See 14 animals that have shown us their impressive smarts

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Scientific research constantly gives glimpses into new dimensions of animal cognition. But intelligence-which is so complex and encompasses such a wide range of adaptive abilities-remains confoundingly tricky to measure. "One of the biggest challenges is our inability to comprehend how other species process information," says Kristina Horback, an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, who studies the cognitive abilities of livestock animals.

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Do animals have language? - Michele Bishop

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Watch Koko the Gorilla Use Sign Language in This 1981 Film | National Geographic

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Project Nim (2011) - Official Trailer [HD]