Secret Of The Wild Child Analysis

The documentary title “Secret of the Wild Child” is an interesting title that captivates the audience to watch the video because of the last two words wild child makes the audience curious to what does a wild child look like and how does it behave. The music in the video sounds is calm and nurturing playing through some scene in the video. This was broadcast by PBS on its series NOVA. NOVA often includes interviews with scientists doing research in the subject areas covered and occasionally includes footage of a particular discovery. It was aired on October 18, 1994. It remains relevant because it talks about how child neglecting can have a severe outcome on child development such as the extreme case with Genie. The nova episode talks

At first, it was clear Genie could understand more than she was able to speak. Slowly, over 2 years, she began to understand more and more. She finally picked up the difference between singular and plural nouns, negative and positive sentence distinctions, possessive constructions, a few prepositions, and some modifications. Toward the end on Genie research in the fall of 1974 NIHM, the National Institute of Mental Health stopped funding the Genie project, citing failure to collect data in a scientifically meaningful way. For linguist Susan Curtiss, it was time to sum up her years of work with Genie. She finally picked up the difference between singular and plural nouns, negative and positive sentence distinctions, possessive constructions, a few prepositions, and some modifications. Unfortunately, Genie didn’t seem to be able to put words together in a normal, grammatical way. This seemed to support the idea of a critical period for acquiring language. It is unclear if her inability to learn was due to the fact that she had missed her critical period, or the fact that she had undergone extreme trauma as a child. It is also hard to assess this case because researchers weren't able to test her immediately upon discovery to

The University of Rochester wrote an article about language development critical periods. In this article, it talks about the evidence for the critical or sensitive period for language acquisition. And question concerning a critical or sensitive period for language acquisition. The article go more into depth on critical period than the documentary which was focus more on the scientist experience with Genie. The definition given by Rochester for critical period is a maturational time period during some crucial experiences in development or learning, resulting in normal behavior (Rochester, 2006). In the documentary we are told that a child who did not learn a language before puberty then it is nearly impossible to learn a first language. Here we are able to learn the reason why it’s difficult for a child who has reached puberty won’t be able to speak the language properly. We learn that feral or abused children are exposed to their first language after puberty they show an extreme shortage in phonology (system of sound), morphology (he study of the forms of words), and syntax. This is why Genie was not able to speak the English language at proficiently because her phonology was abnormal, and her control over English syntax and morphology was limited to the simplest aspect of language (Rochester, 2006). Learning this gives us a better understanding on why genie is