Susan Curtiss (born 1949) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/04/13/i-a-silent-childhoodis an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Curtiss's main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie, a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI; maturational constraints on first-language development ("critical period" effects); hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition; and the cognitive modularity of grammar.
Biography Susan Curtiss received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles where her doctoral advisor was Victoria Fromkin. There, she studied Genie, the feral child. Curtiss wrote her doctoral thesis on Genie. Curtiss's dissertation is now regarded as the most significant research that addressed Genie's acquisition of language. After receiving her PhD, she continued to study critical periods, modularity, and grammatical development at UCLA.
She is married and has two daughters.Rymer, Russ. "A Silent Childhood." New Yorker, 20 Apr. 1992, pp. 43–77.
Work with Genie In November 1970, the child welfare authorities of Los Angeles discovered a young girl who had been subject to extreme isolation and abuse. At the time of her discovery, the girl, who was given the pseudonym "Genie," was approximately 13 years and 7 months old, and it was determined that her isolation began at around 20 months of age. Many people were involved in Genie's case including social workers, psychologists, and linguists.
In May 1971, Susan Curtiss, alongside a team of researchers, began researching Genie. When Genie was admitted to the hospital, at the age of 13 years and 7 months, doctors concluded that she had not acquired a first language. The research team set out to determine whether Genie was capable of comprehending or producing language. They found she could understand far more than she was able to produce, and from there, the team tried to both teach Genie facets of the English language as well as test her understanding of how to employ those features.Curtiss, Susan, et al. "The linguistic development of Genie." Language (1974): 528-554. Curtiss, specifically, set out to teach Genie the difference between singular and plural count nouns. Curtiss developed a game to help Genie understand the plural construction rule—Curtiss would say a noun phrase such as "four horses," and Genie would find the index card that had the number 4, the index card that had a picture of horses, and the index card that had the letter "s" to construct that phrase. Using this game, Genie was able to learn regular English pluralization in 3 weeks.
Over the course of study, Genie's language developed in several ways. The researchers noted, however, that there were significant differences between Genie's language development and that of a normal child—surprisingly, considering her limited exposure to language at the time she was placed into custody, Genie's vocabulary rapidly grew very large. For example, after 7 months in the hospital, Genie could produce about 200 words whereas a child at the equivalent linguistic stage can produce about 50 words. To contrast, her syntax was quite limited. Genie acquired few syntactic rules, and she produced few sentences longer than 3 words. Curtiss and her research team found that despite Genie's limited acquisition of syntax, she had relatively advanced cognitive abilities. Curtiss observed isolated incidents in which she believed Genie showed evidence of using recursion, a complex feature of human language.Curtiss, S. Krashen, S., Fromkin, V., Rigler, D. and Rigler, M. 1973. Language acquisition after the critical period: Genie as of April, 1973. 98-103.
Genie's linguistic development was seen as an opportunity to research critical periods. Prior to the research done on Genie, it was hypothesized that the critical period to acquire a first language would end when the brain lateralized, meaning the tendency for certain functions of the brain to be localized to one hemisphere as opposed to the other. Language is typically localized to the left hemisphere. It is widely held that process of lateralization of the brain ends during puberty, typically around the age of 13.Fromkin, V., Krashen, S., Curtiss, S., Rigler, D. and Rigler, M. 1974. The development of language in Genie: A case of language acquisition beyond the "Critical Period". Brain and Language, vol. 1, 81-107 Curtiss and her team determined that Genie was most likely right-handed, but on dichotic listening tests they discovered that Genie, unlike most right-handed people, was right-hemisphere dominant for language; she had normal results for environmental sounds, proving that her brain was not simply reversed in dominance for language. Curtiss and her team hypothesized that the critical period may not end with the lateralization of the brain. If that were the case, Genie would have acquired no language as the left hemisphere of her brain could not be responsible for the language she had acquired thus far. Curtiss's work with Genie has been frequently cited as evidence for the critical period for syntax.
In 1976, Curtiss completed her doctoral thesis and received her PhD from UCLA. Curtiss's thesis is the most significant research that has been published on Genie. In 1977, Academic Press published her thesis as a book titled Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of A Modern-Day "Wild Child."
As part of her work with Genie, Curtiss was featured in the 1994 Nova documentary Secret of the Wild Child and the 2003 "Wild Child" episode of the television series Body Shock. She was a script consultant for the movie Mockingbird Don't Sing (2001), and was the only person directly involved in the case to be involved in the film's making.
Controversy Genie's case has been a source of controversy. During the years in which Genie was studied, Jean Butler (who later began using her married name, Ruch), Genie's former teacher and foster parent, argued against the research. Ruch claimed that David Rigler, principal investigator of the Genie case, was putting the research ahead of Genie's best interests and that Curtiss was a hindrance around the home that Ruch and Genie lived in. She further accused Rigler and Curtiss of disregarding data from the two months Genie lived in Ruch's home as it did not align with the goals of their research. The Riglers, who became Genie's foster parents immediately afterwards, and Curtiss said that Ruch's writing about Genie's social and linguistic development were highly inconsistent with their observations from after her removal from Ruch's home.
In the years following Curtiss's work with Genie, some scholars have cast doubt on her research. It has been suggested that Curtiss's findings were inconsistent, stating that there was not enough evidence to support the claim that Genie was not acquiring significant syntax, and rather that Curtiss presented examples to the contrary.Jones, Peter E. "Contradictions and unanswered questions in the Genie case: A fresh look at the linguistic evidence." Language & Communication 15.3 (1995): 261–280. Others have suggested that studying Genie and administering tests was unethical. Genie's mother argued that Genie was over-tested and that the research team violated confidentiality rules. As a result, she filed a lawsuit in 1979 against those who researched Genie.
Some scholars argued that the team put the research ahead of Genie's best interests. Jay Shurley and David Elkind, who were involved in the early phases of Genie's case study, left the research team over these concerns.Dutch, Jeremiah B. ""Genie" and Her Implications." Additionally, people believe that members of the research team took on too many roles in an attempt to study, befriend, and parent Genie. Each of the researchers hold that they never put their work ahead of Genie's wellbeing, and there are several scholars who support them, stating that they treated Genie as a human rather than a test subject.
Other major accomplishments
Critical periods Susan Curtiss's work with Genie lent itself greatly to her research on critical periods. As the case study of Genie demonstrated, reaching puberty without having had significant exposure to language does not mean that an individual will be unable to communicate for the remainder of their life. Rather, it means that while the individual can learn vocabulary but will be extremely unlikely to learn the syntax of the language.
In 1980, Curtiss began research on a woman who was given the pseudonym "Chelsea." Chelsea, 32, had been born deaf, but in childhood was not diagnosed as such. This misdiagnosis led to Chelsea never receiving any language input from American Sign Language (ASL) nor any auditory input.
Additionally, no system of home sign ever arose in her home. Local social services requested an examination of Chelsea when she was 32, leading to the discovery that she was deaf. At that time, she was fitted with her first pair of hearing aids, and began working with Susan Curtiss.Curtiss, Susan. "The Case of Chelsea." UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 18, pp. 115-46.
Curtiss observed that Chelsea was able to learn new vocabulary quickly, similarly to Genie. Chelsea showed strength in regard to semantics and categorizing words according to their meanings. However, she was unable to develop her syntactic abilities in any significant way. Curtiss noted that Chelsea was unable to consistently produce utterances that were well-formed. Chelsea struggled to generate sentences that followed the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order of English. Curtiss notes that Chelsea was able to grasp many of the non-verbal characteristics of conversation, such as turn-taking, conversational fillers, and facial expressions.
Curtiss compares Genie and Chelsea, offering both cases as supporting evidence for a critical period for syntax. Neither of these two individuals had significant exposure to language prior to reaching puberty, and despite attempts to teach them English, neither of them was able to grasp syntax. Curtiss notes that Genie was able to grasp certain facets of the English language, such as phrasal categories, whereas Chelsea was only able to enlarge her lexicon and understand discourse.
Modularity Curtiss has also done research on the modularity of grammar, exploring syntax and semantics are separate faculties of human language. In pursuit of this, Curtiss has conducted research on children who show evidence of dissociating different faculties of language from one another. This research has also served as evidence for the modularity of grammar. In her 1981 article titled Dissociations Between Language and Cognition: Cases and Implications, Curtiss explores the language systems of three children: Genie, Antony, and Marta.Curtiss, Susan. "Dissociations between language and cognition: Cases and implications." Journal of autism and developmental disorders 11.1 (1981): 15-3