Wild & Isolated Children & The Critical Age Issue
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Transcript Wild & Isolated Children & The Critical Age Issue
Wild & Isolated Children
& The Critical Age Issue
Lec. 6
Language & human beings
Is language as natural to human beings as walking and smiling?
Are children able to produce and comprehend language without experiencing
language?
Is there an age beyond which a person is unable to learn a first or a second
language?
What happens when children grow up with little human contact, or no love?
Wild & isolated children
There have been a number of reported cases of children raised by wolves,
dogs, pigs, sheep, and other animals. These children are known as wild or
feral children.
And, there are cases of children who have been kept in confinement or
isolation by their parents or others, and consequently were not exposed to
language.
Reported cases of wild& isolated
children
Victor: the wild boy of Aveyron
Reported cases of wild& isolated
children
Genie: raised in isolation
Helen Keller: the renowned deaf & blind girl
A critical age for first-language learning
Why did Helen fully learn language, while Vector and Genie didn’t?
Without exposure to language, children will not acquire language. Children need
some form of exposure, in the form of speech, signs, writing, or touch, before
language learning can occur and that exposure should be offered as early as
possible in the child’s life.
A critical age for first-language learning
Two major factors governing language learning
1.
The age at which exposure to language began, and
2.
2. the extent of any physical, psychological, and social trauma prior to
exposure to language
A critical age for first-language learning
The critical period hypotheses
The belief that the ability to learn language declines with increasing age.
1.
Certain biological events related to language development can only happen in
an early critical period.
2.
Certain linguistic events must happen to the child during this period for
development to proceed normally.