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.
