by onacruse 30 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Well Craig, your premise is faulty, as it assumes the baby can survive if its basic needs were cared for but it was completely deprived of touch. Touch is a basic human need, and without it health will fail and death can result.
If the question is, will a child develop language in the event that ALL its needs are met, but is never exposed to speaking, or human sounds of any sort.
As to the answer, I have absolutely NO idea.
Seems to me children first understand concepts and then comes the verbage. Later in life reasoning and conceptualization depend first on the vocabulary. Groups like the Watch Tower group establishes a firm control of the vocabulary of the members and then the group reduces the approved vocabulary. That limits ability to reason.
Next the Watch Tower leaders teach by rote repetition the concepts they want their students to accept as fact. Now they have the concepts established as core beliefs, punishments in place, and the language limited to not allow reasoning at the next level.
Language is the basis of thinking. One can't think that which they do not have the vocabulary to support. Good thread, Thanks!
If the question is, will a child develop language in the event that ALL its needs are met, but is never exposed to speaking, or human sounds of any sort.
I believe the answer is NO.
weds
Hi ona waves back
For obvious reasons, no one can possibly know for sure if such a deprived infant would die, but I suspect that, given all of its physical needs -- which might be by robotic means of some sort -- it would live for quite some time. I don't think it would develop language, though.
I seem to recall reading about a French boy in the 1800s who was somehow abandoned by his parents and lived deep in the woods until he was roughly 10-12 years old. The story was that he had no language skills at all, and never developed any. If anyone can recall this story better than I, please give some references.
AlanF
I would have to say yes----a healthy normal infant would find a "system" of communication, whether it be in the form of grunts, actions or facial expressions. Humans are social beings and even hearing impaired youngsters make their wants and wishes known despite having never heard the human voice.
Annie
My 4 year old daughter is mildly autistic and has a lot of trouble speaking. One way she gets around it is by inventing different words for certain things. That tells me that language is hardwired in the brain, cuz if it wasn't how would she have made up the words?
She may make up words she has not heard before, but she hears u speak. She has heard people speak.
I seem to recall reading about a French boy in the 1800s who was somehow abandoned by his parents and lived deep in the woods until he was roughly 10-12 years old. The story was that he had no language skills at all, and never developed any. If anyone can recall this story better than I, please give some references.AlanF
Here ya go AlanF:
Victor of Aveyron is perhaps the best-known feral child, made famous through Truffaut's film L'Enfant Sauvage. Victor is considered by many to be the first documented case of autism.
Victor was first sighted wandering in the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, in southern France, at the end of the 18th century. He was captured but subsequently escaped, and wasn't retaken until January 1800 when he emerged from the woods. Aged about 12, he couldn't speak and bore a number of scars, suggesting he'd been in the wild for some time.
Victor was given his name after the leading character in the play Victor, ou l'enfant de la forêt, the oddly prescient melodramatic play ? indeed, the first fully developed melodrama ? by René Guilbert de Pixérécourt, written in 1797/8, first produced in 1798 and published in 1803, and itself based on a book with the same name written by François Guil Ducray-Duminil in 1796.
Recent research into local and national archives in France suggests that Victor was probably abandoned by his family. There are suggestions that there was a child living in the area who could not speak.
Victor's discovery coincided with the age of Enlightenment, when debate raged about what exactly separated humans from animals, and he was thus ideal experimental fodder for the scientists, just as Genie was so many years later. Victor eventually ended up with Itard, who wanted to teach him to speak and generally civilise him, but Itard made little progress.
Victor, the wild boy of Averyon, died at the age of 40 at an annexe of the Paris Institution des Sourds-Muets at 4 Impasse des Feuillantines where he lived with Mme Guérin.
There are many books about Victor, among which the most important are Itard's own major works, Mémoir sur les Premiers Développements de Victor de l'Aveyron (1801), and Rapport sur les Nouveaux Développements de Victor de l'Aveyron (1806), both here on this site (in French). English translations of both these works appear in Wolf Children and the Problems of Human Nature.
Newton's book Savage Girls and Wild Boys has an extensive chapter devoted to Victor, and to Itard's attempts to teach Victor to communicate via a variety of different means.
Other books to feature Victor of Aveyron include The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of The Wild Boy of Aveyron and The Wild Boy of Aveyron.
For somewhat lighter reading, try Jill Dawson's Wild Boy ? a fictionalised account, bringing to life Itard's tale through the introduction of human emotion.
You can read Nancy Yousef's Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and Rousseau's Man of Nature on this site. There's also a section on Victor in Douthwaite's article Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model.
Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron
Date: 1799
Age: 11
Location: Aveyron, France Learn more about Victor in: 
Wild Boy 
Kaspar Hausers Geschwister. Auf der Suche nach dem wilden Menschen 
Savage Girls and Wild Boys : A History of Feral Children 
Les enfants sauvages 
The Wild Boy
Wild Children: Growing Up Without Human Contact 
Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature
Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature
Such an experiment was once proposed by Derek Bickerton (a much less severe version, of course), but it was never developed due to ethical problems.
