The story of Genie is undoubtedly one of the saddest ones one can imagine. What has been done to her is something no one would ever wish to anyone, not even to their worst enemies.

Her story begins on November 4th, 1970, when she and her blind mother walk into the general social services office early in the morning. Her mother had not been seeking help for Genie, but for herself. Three weeks before that she had finally been able to flee from an abusive marriage, and that morning she did not have the intention to go to the general social services office. Instead she had wanted to go to the services for the blind. By fate or simply by luck for Genie she stumbled into this office. The eligibility worker noticed Genie, and thought he had found an unreported case of autism: this girl had a manner of walking and standing to her that was very unnatural. He alerted his supervisor, he noticed the girl was not autistic, but that there was something unmistakenly wrong. A social worker visited her home, and had her transferred to

If we look at the progression children normally make in forming a negative sentence: it starts with 'No have toy', then comes 'I not have toy' and then the child forms the sentence 'I don(o)t have a toy'. Genie stayed stuck in that first three-word stage for years. Furthermore, she still could not ask a normal question. Wh-movement was a facility not present in Genie's brain, which made it impossible for her to form a Wh-question. She could understand the questions though, but when she was pushed to form herself, she came with questions like 'I where is graham cracker on top shelf?'. She also had a problem with pronouns: she did not distinguish between 'me' and 'you'. She never figured out who she was and who someone else, Rymer says in his book. She could communicate extremely well though: whether it was with gestures, pictures, mime or homomyms. She would come when she was called for, however she could not call for anyone herself. Many scientists had to face her failure: Genie had levelled out in language learning almost immediately after she was discovered. Some scientists claimed that her failure was because she was retarded. Curtiss does not believe this. She stated that Genie scored a perfect adult score on tests measuring her spatial capabilities. Furthermore, her mental age advanced a year for every year she had been out of isolation. This does not happen with retarded children. And she did progress: in March 1974 she combined two skills- fantasizing verbally and manipulating- to tell an outright lie. Furthermore, she started to use language to explain an event that had happened in the past. She told the Rigler family in the late summer of 1974 about how her father had hit her with a stick. This answered the question of whether she would be able to explain events that had happened before language was part of her world.

By November of 1971, one year after she had been admitted to the Childrens Hospital, Genie's grammar was like that of a normal 18 to 20 month old child. In the weeks before the convention in November, Genie had finally shown to recognize the difference between singulars and plurals. She also showed to know the difference between negative and positive sentences. Likewise, she showed to know the meaning of some propositions like 'in', so that when asked where elephants were found she could reply 'in zoo'. She could understand yes or no questions, and could understand possesiveness. She was now producing two-word sentences, instead of one-word sentences, and sometimes she even spoke in a three-word sentence. However, Fromkin explained, a two-word sentence is quite complicated. A lot more complicated that it may seem, since the child can not just choose any two words from that sentence, but it has to choose the two key-words. Fromkin even started to believe that Genie started to learn some of the rules of English grammar. Nonetheless she deleted the notes she took on Genie's -existing or not existing- grammar use before she went to the conference. Fromkin at first suspected that Genie could still learn grammar and syntax, which would disprove Lenneberg's theory.

Genie, looking as if she was 6 or 7 was in reality a teenager. She weighed only 4 stone, and was four and a half feet tall. She was incontinent, could not chew food, she could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet and she could not cry. She could not hop, skip, climb or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of heat or cold.

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Approximate Word count = 4836
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page double spaced)