Genie

Genie (born April 18, 1957, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was an American child raised in social isolation and subject to severe abuse and neglect prior to being discovered by a social worker in 1970. The child, called Genie by scientists to protect her identity, was physically underdeveloped, incontinent, barely able to walk, and unable to speak when she was discovered. Genie became the focus of a study about aspects of human development conducted by a team of psychologists and linguists.

For the first 13 years of her life, Genie was kept restrained in a small room with curtained windows and a closed door. During the day, she was harnessed naked to a toilet seat, and at night she was straitjacketed and enclosed in a covered crib with wire-mesh sides. Because her father, Clark Wiley, disliked noise, he would beat her if she made any, and he never spoke to her—only growled and made barking sounds. This was thought to have contributed to her extreme fear of dogs and cats. Her mother, Irene Wiley, diagnosed with cataracts and nearly blind, was allowed very limited interactions with Genie. Her elder brother, who was terrified of their father, became Genie’s caretaker, feeding her only baby food, cereal, and milk, which he did without talking to her, per their father’s instructions.

In 1970, while Genie’s father was out shopping for groceries, her mother took Genie to what she thought was a blindness disability benefits office. Instead, they walked into a social services office, where a social worker immediately noticed Genie’s condition and odd gait, which mimicked a rabbit’s hopping. Genie’s parents were arrested and charged with abuse. The charges against Irene Wiley were dismissed in 1975 after her attorney argued that she too was a victim of her husband’s abuse and had never been willfully cruel to Genie. Clark Wiley died by suicide shortly before he was scheduled to appear in court. Meanwhile, Genie was admitted to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles on November 4, 1970.

The discovery of Genie presented a unique and timely opportunity for scientists to study whether a deprived and isolated child could mentally develop when provided an enhanced learning environment. The opportunity was unique because it would violate ethical norms for scientists to deliberately deprive a child of basic necessities in the name of research. Her discovery was timely as well, as it came in the midst of a debate over neuropsychologist Eric Lenneberg’s “critical period” hypothesis of language acquisition. His hypothesis was based on linguist Noam Chomsky’s innateness theory, which postulated that all humans are born with a preprogrammed sense of grammar. Lenneberg suggested that if grammar was not acquired in the “critical period” before puberty, much of this preprogrammed sense of grammar would be lost, and language could only be acquired after this point with great difficulty.

In 1971 hospital staff involved in Genie’s case applied for and received a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant to fund scientific research on her and support her rehabilitation. A team led by psychologist David Rigler and including psychologist James Kent, linguist Victoria Fromkin, and linguistics graduate student Susan Curtiss was assembled to conduct the study and document Genie’s progress. One of the focal points of the study was to prove or disprove the critical period hypothesis of language acquisition.

Working with the team, Genie progressed quickly with her basic skills and was able to dress herself and use a toilet, but, although she was strong in nonverbal communication skills, she did not progress as quickly with her language skills. She had an inquisitive nature and learned and recognized many new words but spoke only single words for the first several months of her rehabilitation. She gradually began to utter two-word phrases, including, “little marble,” “big teeth,” and “want milk,” and by November 1971 she was occasionally stringing three words together. Despite efforts to teach them to her, she never understood grammatical principles.

Genie lived with multiple researchers during the study, raising questions about the balance between research and rehabilitation. Notably, she was fostered by lead researcher Rigler and his wife, Marilyn, from 1971 through 1975.

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The study shed crucial light on the critical period hypothesis of language acquisition, but, because of problems with data collection, NIMH withdrew funding for research into Genie’s abilities in 1974. In 1975 Irene Wiley sued the scientists and hospital staff for overtaxing Genie with their testing practices. Researchers disputed the claim, saying that they had never pushed Genie to an unhealthy extent. Genie returned to live with Wiley in 1975, but she proved to be unable to care for her. Genie was moved to various foster homes, leading to a great deal of regression in her language abilities, especially after again facing abuse and mistreatment, this time as a ward of the state.

As of 2023, there is no public record of whether Genie is still alive, and if she is, where she is living. If she were alive, she would be 66 years old. A private investigation conducted in 2000 reportedly revealed that Genie was living in an adult care facility with subpar conditions but described her as being happy. The story of Genie’s childhood and the NIMH-funded study about her is the topic of the documentary Secret of the Wild Child (1994) and the book Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (1993) by author and journalist Russ Rymer.