Lev Vygotsky's Life Of Genie

In 1970, a 13-year-old girl was rescued from her Los Angeles home by the child welfare authorities. The girl, who was later given a pseudonym Genie, had suffered from extreme abuse, neglect and social isolation from her family. She had been kept in a closed bedroom without being spoken to, listening to radios, or watching TV for almost 11 years. She had “ acquired virtually no language” (Piper p66) when she was first found. Following her rescue, Genie had undergone extensive training, linguistic education, and testing for years. Although she progressed rapidly on nonlinguistic areas and even achieved age-appropriate level on some perceptual tasks, linguistically, Genie “failed to reach adult levels” (Eysenck p123). Her utterance was usually …show more content…
His parents were well-educated Jews. Vygotsky was admitted by Moscow University despite of the discriminative quota placed on Jewish students. Later he transferred to Shanavsky’s University to pursue his passion in “language, literature, art, and philosophy” (Smidt p9). Vygotsky turned his focus to psychology when he was 28 years old, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 38 in 1934. During the last ten years of his life, he conducted “ a series of investigations in developmental psychology, pedagogy and psychopathology” (marx website). Vygotsky presented his language cognition development theory in his book Thought and Language, which was published …show more content…
He discussed several experiments trying to teach chimpanzees language but failed. He did think that chimpanzees possessed “effective intellectual functioning”, but language “demands an intellectual operation of a different kind”

There are no indications whatever of such an operation’s being within the chimpanzees’ reach, and most investigators assume that they lack this ability. This lack may be the chief difference between chimpanzee and human