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There was a girl who'd been kept in a room tied to a chair, and never spoken to / forbidden from making any sound, by her parents, since she was a toddler. She

There was a girl who'd been kept in a room tied to a chair, and never spoken to / forbidden from making any sound, by her parents, since she was a toddler. She had virtually no language when she was discovered at age 13. She eventually learned additional vocabulary referring to physical objects, but she never grasped grammar. Yes, she had a lot of other psychological damage, but there appears to be critical periods in the acquisition of language. Keller's brilliance might never have been given voice if the attempt at teaching her language had occurred later. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-...

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yes that's very insightful on some of the mechanics of language acquisition and the later impact on language fluency of missing that window. It does not show that thinking or memory are absent before language acquisition or in people who never acquire it, which was implied by the comment I was responding to. Keller's ability to communicate to others would certainly have been limited or absent if she hadn't had the opportunities in youth she had. But she still would have been able to form and recall memories, and engage with her own mind in some totally-opaque-to-us way.
- sillystuff 4y ago
  Yes, I wasn't commenting on thinking and memory in non-verbal humans or non-human animals, for that matter; it seems obvious, to me, that these are present. I'm just not sure thinking in images and other sensations without words can be called language? While writing this, I was reminded of some children (ages 6 to 23), I used to interact with at a job (many years ago), who could hear but were non-verbal and communicated with fingerboards. They would string images together to form "sentences", and overload images on their fingerboards to use as names for people around them (and these image names often made semantic sense, describing an attribute of the person being named e.g., the person who drove their school bus referred to by a picture of a bus). They did understand varying amounts of spoken English which makes it ambiguous if this is really support of language without words, though. The concept of a language of images and other sensations without words as we know them is intriguing. Thanks for inspiring me take a few minutes to think about this more deeply.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Yes that's very insightful on some of the mechanics of language acquisition and the later impact on language fluency of missing that window. It does not show that thinking or memory are absent before language acquisition or in people who never acquire it, which was implied by the comment I was responding to. Keller's ability to communicate to others would certainly have been limited or absent if she hadn't had the opportunities in youth she had. But she still would have been able to form and recall memories, and engage with her own mind in some totally-opaque-to-us way.

sillystuff 4y ago
Yes, I wasn't commenting on thinking and memory in non-verbal humans or non-human animals, for that matter; it seems obvious, to me, that these are present. I'm just not sure thinking in images and other sensations without words can be called language? While writing this, I was reminded of some children (ages 6 to 23), I used to interact with at a job (many years ago), who could hear but were non-verbal and communicated with fingerboards. They would string images together to form "sentences", and overload images on their fingerboards to use as names for people around them (and these image names often made semantic sense, describing an attribute of the person being named e.g., the person who drove their school bus referred to by a picture of a bus). They did understand varying amounts of spoken English which makes it ambiguous if this is really support of language without words, though. The concept of a language of images and other sensations without words as we know them is intriguing. Thanks for inspiring me take a few minutes to think about this more deeply.