How Nurture can affects our Personality: The Story of a Feral Child In the documentary video "The Secret of the Wild Child: Story of Genie”, the audience is introduced to Genie’s story, a girl who was held in captivity and isolated by her own father since the moment she was a baby until she was 13 years old. She became primitive, and showed many non-human features. The purpose of this assignment is to debate whether Genie’s behavior was the responsibility of nature or nurture, meaning that if her condition was the cause of a genetic malfunction disease or the isolated environment she grew in. In my opinion, Genie’s intellectual and social problems were more a function of nurture or lack of human contact and socialization, because she was
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She didn’t received any kind of cognitive stimulation to develop and increase her learning capacity. She was prohibited to communicate using a language or any kind of words. After Genie was rescued by social workers, she showed that she was capable of gathering new information, but at that stage of her life it was too late for her to learn like a normal person. Lenneberg stated that we born with the principle of languages, but there is a deadline to apply it. If a first language is not acquire it by puberty it may be too late. This is the reason why, even thought Genie’s was learning to talk, it was very hard for her to do so because she already passed the age of learning a first language. I believe that Genie’s case was a function of nurture, because she demonstrated to the doctors that she had the capability of learning, even when she was exposed to this new learning at a late stage of her life. This just shows that language is most definitely a product of …show more content…
In the video, Genie showed that she was capable of acquiring new knowledge, but she was too old to learn the proper way of using the grammatical system, due to the fact that she was not exposed to it early in her life. If the person is not exposed to cognitive stimulation it will become a feral or undomesticated human, and it will not develop any basic learnings. Also, a human being that is not exposed to any kind of human contact and socialization will develop characteristics more similar to those of an animal. This documentary showed that nurture is a critical factor for a human development and it can affect a person’s ability to
She didn’t received any kind of cognitive stimulation to develop and increase her learning capacity. She was prohibited to communicate using a language or any kind of words. After Genie was rescued by social workers, she showed that she was capable of gathering new information, but at that stage of her life it was too late for her to learn like a normal person. Lenneberg stated that we born with the principle of languages, but there is a deadline to apply it. If a first language is not acquire it by puberty it may be too late. This is the reason why, even thought Genie’s was learning to talk, it was very hard for her to do so because she already passed the age of learning a first language. I believe that Genie’s case was a function of nurture, because she demonstrated to the doctors that she had the capability of learning, even when she was exposed to this new learning at a late stage of her life. This just shows that language is most definitely a product of …show more content…
In the video, Genie showed that she was capable of acquiring new knowledge, but she was too old to learn the proper way of using the grammatical system, due to the fact that she was not exposed to it early in her life. If the person is not exposed to cognitive stimulation it will become a feral or undomesticated human, and it will not develop any basic learnings. Also, a human being that is not exposed to any kind of human contact and socialization will develop characteristics more similar to those of an animal. This documentary showed that nurture is a critical factor for a human development and it can affect a person’s ability to