Genie

As of 2016, Genie is a ward of the state of California living in an undisclosed location in Los Angeles. In two articles published in May 2008, ABC News reported that someone who spoke to them under condition of anonymity had hired a private investigator who located Genie in 2000. According to the investigator, she was living a simple lifestyle in a small private facility for mentally underdeveloped adults and appeared to be happy, and reportedly only spoke a few words but could still communicate fairly well in sign language. The news stories also stated that Genie's mother died of unspecified natural causes at the age of 87, in 2003, and featured the only public interview that Genie's brother, who was then living in Ohio, gave about either his or Genie's lives; he told reporters that since leaving the Los Angeles area he had visited Genie and their mother only once, in 1982, and had refused to watch or read anything about Genie's life until just prior to the interview, but said he had recently heard Genie was doing well. A story by journalist Rory Carroll in The Guardian, published in July 2016, reported that Genie still lived in state care and that her brother died in 2011, and said that despite repeated efforts Susan Curtiss had been unable to renew contact with Genie.

News of Genie reached major media outlets on November 17, receiving a great deal of local and national attention, and the one photograph authorities released of Genie significantly fueled public interest in her. Although Genie's father refused to speak to police or the media, large crowds subsequently went to try to see him, which he reportedly found extremely difficult to handle. On November 20, the morning before a scheduled court appearance on child abuse charges, he committed suicide by gunshot. Police found two suicide notes, one intended for his son which in part said, "Be a good boy, I love you", and one directed at police. One note—sources conflict as to which—contained the declaration, "The world will never understand."

From the start Genie showed a small amount of responsiveness to nonverbal information, including gestures and facial expressions from other people, and made reasonably good eye contact. However, her demeanor was completely devoid of any expressions or discernible body language, and she could only nonverbally get across a few very basic needs. She clearly distinguished speaking from other sounds but remained almost completely silent and unresponsive to speech, and any responses she gave were to accompanying nonverbal signals. When upset Genie would wildly attack herself, but remained completely expressionless and never cried or vocalized; some accounts said she could not cry at all. To make noise, she would push chairs or other similar objects. Her outbursts initially occurred very often and had no discernible trigger—Kent wrote that she never tried to indicate the source of her anger—and continued until someone diverted her attention or she physically tired herself out, at which point she would again become silent and non-expressive.

Soon after moving in with Butler, Genie started showing the first signs of reaching puberty, marking a dramatic improvement in her overall physical health and definitively putting her past Lenneberg's proposed critical period for language acquisition. Butler continued to observe and document Genie's hoarding, in particular noting that Genie collected and kept dozens of containers of liquid in her room. Although she could not discern the reason for Genie's intense fear of cats and dogs, after witnessing it firsthand Butler and the man she was dating—who was a retired University of Southern California professor and psychologist—tried to help her overcome it by watching episodes of the television series Lassie with her and giving her a battery-powered toy dog. Butler wrote that Genie could eventually tolerate fenced dogs, but that there was no progress with cats.

Father hit arm. Big wood. Genie cry  ... Not spit. Father. Hit face—spit. Father hit big stick. Father is angry. Father hit Genie big stick. Father take piece wood hit. Cry. Father make me cry. Father is dead.

Genie quickly began growing and putting on weight and steadily became more confident in her movements, and by December she had good eye–hand coordination and was much better at focusing her eyes. She rapidly developed a sense of possession, hoarding objects to which she took a liking for reasons doctors did not know, and became extremely upset if someone touched or moved anything she collected. She took all kinds of items but particularly sought colorful plastic objects, which doctors speculated was due to these having been the items she had access to as a child, and she did not seem to care whether they were toys or ordinary containers but especially sought out beach pails. During the first few months of her stay, giving her one of these objects could bring her out of a tantrum.

At around the same time Curtiss began her work, doctors reevaluated Genie on the Leiter scale and measured her on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale, which placed her estimated mental age between a 5- and 8-year-old with a very high degree of scatter. Doctors believed Genie had learned to use her gestalt perception to determine the number of objects in a group, and by the start of the case study she could accurately discern the correct number of up to 7 objects via gestalt perception. Child psychologist David Elkind, who was involved in the grant meetings, evaluated Genie in May 1971 and reported that she was in the concrete operational stage of development, noting that she understood object permanence and could engage in deferred imitation. Genie's physical health also continued to improve, and by this time her endurance had dramatically increased. Her social behavior was still highly abnormal, and doctors were especially concerned that she almost never interacted with people her age, but evaluations from the time expressed some optimism about her prognosis.

At the age of 11 months Genie was still in overall good health and had no noted mental abnormalities, but had fallen to the 11th percentile for weight. The people who later studied her believed this was a sign that she was starting to suffer some degree of malnutrition. When Genie was 14 months old, she came down with a fever and pneumonitis and her parents took her to a pediatrician who had not previously seen her. The pediatrician said that, although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded and that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present, further amplifying her father's conclusion that she was severely retarded.

The independent film Mockingbird Don't Sing, released in 2001, is about Genie's case, primarily from the perspective of Susan Curtiss. For legal reasons, all of the names in the film were changed.

Several books about feral or abused children contain chapters on Genie, and many books on linguistics and psychology also discuss Genie's case at length. In 1994, Nova made a documentary about Genie titled Secret of the Wild Child, based on Russ Rymer's book, and narrated by Stacy Keach. It won multiple Emmy Awards. The scientists' footage Nova used from the case study archives had significantly deteriorated, and required restoration for use in the documentary. In 2002, an episode of the television series Body Shock on feral children entitled "Wild Child" included a segment on Genie. In addition to Rymer's magazine articles and book about Genie, he said that he drew on Genie's life for the theme of his 2013 novel Paris Twilight.

Several people who worked with Genie, including Curtiss and James Kent, harshly criticized Rymer's works. A late April 1993 New York Times review of Rymer's book from scientific reporter Natalie Angier, which took an extremely negative view of the research team, prompted David Rigler to write a letter to the Times. In this letter, published in mid-June 1993, he gave his first public account of his involvement in Genie's case and wrote that Genie was doing well living in a small, private facility where her mother regularly visited her. He also stated that he and Marilyn were in contact with Genie's mother and had recently reestablished contact with Genie, writing that Genie was happy and that on their first visit she immediately greeted him and Marilyn by name, and said that "my wife and I have resumed our (now infrequent) visits with Genie and her mother."

Regional media immediately picked up the lawsuit, and members of the research team were shocked when they found out about it. All of the scientists named in the suit were adamant that they never coerced Genie, maintaining that Genie's mother and her lawyers grossly exaggerated the length and nature of their testing, and denied any breach of confidentiality. While David Rigler was giving his deposition he discovered that Jean Butler Ruch had goaded Genie's mother into suing, and in an interview several years later the lawyers who worked with Genie's mother confirmed Ruch heavily influenced the actions of Genie's mother throughout the course of the lawsuit. According to author Russ Rymer, the suit was settled in 1984. However, in 1993 David Rigler wrote, "[T]he case never came to trial. It was dismissed by the Superior Court of the State of California 'with prejudice,' meaning that because it was without substance it can never again be refiled."

In January 1978, Genie's mother forbade all scientific observations and testing of Genie. Little is known about her circumstances since then. Her current whereabouts are uncertain, although she is believed to be living in the care of the state of California. Psychologists and linguists continue to discuss her, and there is considerable academic and media interest in her development and the research team's methods. In particular, scientists have compared Genie to Victor of Aveyron, a 19th-century French child who was also the subject of a case study in delayed psychological development and late language acquisition.

Susan Curtiss said that in late December 1977 she had been asked if she could be Genie's legal guardian but that, after she met with Genie on January 3, 1978, Genie's mother suddenly stopped allowing her and the rest of the research team to see Genie again, immediately ending all testing and observations. In early 1978, authorities discovered that, after Genie turned 18, John Miner had failed to update his status as Genie's legal guardian as a minor to that of her legal guardian as an adult incapable of caring for herself. Without consulting Miner, on March 30 of that year authorities officially transferred guardianship to her mother, who subsequently forbade all of the scientists except Jay Shurley from seeing her or Genie. Jean Butler Ruch remained in contact with Genie's mother and continued to spread negative rumors about Genie's condition, especially targeting Curtiss, until 1986, when a stroke left Ruch with aphasia. Ruch died in 1988 following another stroke.

From January 1978 until the early 1990s, Genie moved through a series of at least four additional foster homes and institutions, some of which subjected her to extreme physical abuse and harassment. Shurley saw her at her 27th birthday party in 1984, and again two years later, and in an interview years later he said that both times she was very depressed and uncommunicative. In 1992, Curtiss told Russ Rymer that the only two updates she had heard on Genie indicated she barely spoke and was depressed and withdrawn. When Rymer published a two-part magazine article on Genie in The New Yorker in April of that year he wrote that she lived in an institution and only saw her mother one weekend every month, with the first edition of his 1993 book, entitled Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, stating this as well. The afterword of the 1994 edition of Rymer's book on Genie, written in November 1993, detailed conversations he had with Genie's mother—who had since gone blind again due to glaucoma—just before and after the publication of his magazine articles. At that time she told him that Genie had recently moved into a more supportive foster home which permitted regular visits, and said that Genie was happy and, although hard to understand, was significantly more verbal.

The environment in Genie's new placement was extremely rigid and gave her far less access to her favorite objects and activities, and her caretakers rarely allowed her mother to visit. Soon after she moved in they began to subject her to extreme physical and emotional abuse, resulting in both incontinence and constipation resurfacing and causing her to revert to her coping mechanism of silence. The incident with the strongest impact occurred when they severely beat her for vomiting and told her that if she did it again they would never let her see her mother, making her terrified of opening her mouth for fear of vomiting and facing more punishment. As a result, she was extremely frightened of eating or speaking, and she became extremely withdrawn and almost exclusively relied on sign language for communication. During this time Curtiss was the only person who had worked with Genie to have regular contact with her, continuing to conduct weekly meetings to continue her testing, and she noted the extreme deterioration in Genie's condition. She quickly started petitioning to have Genie taken out of the home, but Curtiss said that both she and social services had a difficult time contacting John Miner, only succeeding after several months. In late April 1977, with assistance from David Rigler, Miner removed her from this location.

Because of Genie's previous treatment, Miner and David Rigler arranged for her to stay at Children's Hospital for two weeks, where her condition moderately improved. Authorities then placed Genie in another foster home, where she did fairly well, but in mid-December 1977 the arrangement very suddenly ended. Through the end of that month into early January Genie lived in a temporary setting, after which authorities put her in another foster home. During this time Curtiss wrote to Miner that Genie did not understand the reasons she was moving and believed it was her fault for not being a good enough person, and said the frequency with which her living arrangements changed further traumatized her and caused continued developmental regression.

Since the publication of Curtiss' findings, her arguments have become widely accepted in the field of linguistics. Many linguistics books have used Genie's case study as an example to illustrate principles of language acquisition, frequently citing it as support of Chomsky's hypothesis of language being innate to humans and of a modified version of Lenneberg's critical period hypothesis, and her work with Genie provided the impetus for several additional case studies. In addition, the disparity between Curtiss' pre- and post-1977 analyses of Genie's language has sparked debate among other linguists regarding how much grammar Genie acquired and whether she could have acquired more. As of 2011, no one directly involved in Genie's case has responded to this controversy.

On several occasions, the Riglers maintained that their home had been the best available option for Genie at the time, and said that both they and everyone who worked with her thought she was doing well. They also said they genuinely loved Genie and always provided her the best care possible, pointing out that she had made substantial progress in every aspect of her development while living with them, and they and Curtiss both said Genie's mother had prevented them from continuing to work with Genie as they had wanted. While representing the Riglers in court in 1977 and 1978 John Miner went out of his way to give them credit for acting as foster parents to Genie for four years, and when Curtiss spoke to Rymer in the early 1990s she praised their work with Genie and their willingness to take her into their home, although she also felt they had not done enough when she told them about Genie's abuse in foster care. Justin Leiber argued that the scientists' inability to do more for Genie was largely out of their control, and primarily the result of legal and institutional processes surrounding her placement.

In 1976, Curtiss finished and presented her dissertation, entitled Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", and Academic Press published it the following year. Prior to this time, Genie's mother had reportedly thought of Genie and Curtiss as friends, but in early 1978 she wrote that she was very offended at the title and some of the contents of Curtiss' dissertation. She decided to sue Children's Hospital, her therapists, their supervisors, and several of the researchers, including Curtiss, Rigler, James Kent, and Howard Hansen. Privately she disputed some details of the family's treatment during Genie's childhood, but her official complaint did not; instead she asserted a violation of patient confidentiality, and accused the research team of giving testing priority over Genie's welfare, invading Genie's privacy, and severely overworking Genie.

During the time Genie lived with the Riglers, everyone who worked with her reported that her mood significantly improved and she was clearly content with her life. As late as June 1975, David Rigler wrote that Genie continued to make significant strides in every field which the scientists were testing, and Curtiss' contemporaneous accounts expressed some optimism about Genie's social development. Nonetheless, even by mid-1975 most social interactions with her remained abnormal in quality. The scientists wrote that, while her overall demeanor and interactions with others had significantly improved, many aspects of her behavior remained characteristic of an unsocialized person.

Throughout linguists' testing, the size of Genie's vocabulary and the speed with which she expanded it continued to outstrip all anticipations. By mid-1975 she could accurately name most objects she encountered, and clearly knew more words than she regularly used. By contrast, Genie had far more difficulty with learning and using basic grammar. She clearly mastered certain principles of grammar, and her receptive comprehension consistently remained significantly ahead of her production, but the rate of her grammar acquisition was far slower than normal and resulted in an unusually large disparity between her vocabulary and grammar. In everyday conversations Genie typically spoke only in short utterances and inconsistently used what grammar she knew, although her use of grammar remained significantly better in imitation, and her conversational competence markedly improved during her stay but remained very low, which the scientists found unsurprising and suggested was evidence that the ability to engage in conversation was a separate skill from knowing language.

Papers contemporaneous with the case study indicated that Genie was learning new vocabulary and grammar throughout her entire stay with the Riglers, and were optimistic about her potential to varying degrees. Nonetheless, even by mid-1975, there were still many pieces of language that she had not acquired. Furthermore, although she could understand and produce longer utterances, she still primarily spoke in short phrases such as "Ball belong hospital". Despite the clear increase in Genie's conversational competence, the scientists wrote that it remained very low compared to normal people. Curtiss and Fromkin ultimately concluded that because Genie had not learned a first language before the critical period had ended, she was unable to fully acquire a language.

There were a few primarily right hemisphere tasks Genie did not perform well on. On one memory for design test, she scored at a "borderline" level in October 1975, although she did not make the mistakes typical of patients with brain damage. In addition, on a Benton Visual Retention Test and an associated facial recognition test Genie's scores were far lower than any average scores for people without brain damage. Although these contrasted with observations of Genie in everyday situations, researchers wrote that they anticipated these results. Curtiss' explanation was that these tasks likely require use of both hemispheres, noting that previous results on the memory for design test found a negative impact from abnormal brain function in either hemisphere and that these would, therefore, be very difficult for Genie since she exclusively used her right hemisphere.

In 1975, when Genie turned 18, her mother stated that she wanted to care for her, and in mid-1975 the Riglers decided to end their foster parenting and agreed to let Genie move back in with her mother at her childhood home. John Miner remained Genie's legal guardian and the Riglers offered to continue assisting with Genie's care, and despite the NIMH grant ending Curtiss continued to conduct regular testing and observations. While living together Genie's mother found many of Genie's behaviors, especially her lack of self-control, very distressing, and after a few months the task of caring for Genie by herself quickly overwhelmed her. She then contacted the California Department of Health to find care for Genie, which David Rigler said she did without his or Marilyn's knowledge, and in the latter part of 1975 authorities transferred Genie to the first of what would become a succession of foster homes.

Throughout Genie's stay the scientists saw how frequently and effectively she used her nonverbal skills, and never determined what she did to elicit such strong reactions from other people. David Rigler vividly remembered an occasion when he and Genie passed a father and a young boy carrying a toy firetruck without speaking to each other and said the boy suddenly turned around and gave the firetruck to Genie. Curtiss also recalled one time when, while she and Genie were walking and had stopped at a busy intersection, she unexpectedly heard a purse emptying; she turned to see a woman stop at the intersection and exit her car to give Genie a plastic purse, even though Genie had not said anything. To take full advantage of her nonverbal communication abilities, in 1974 the Riglers arranged for her to learn a form of sign language.

Curtiss, Fromkin, and Krashen continued to measure Genie's mental age through a variety of measures, and she consistently showed an extremely high degree of scatter. She measured significantly higher on tests which did not require language, such as the Leiter Scale, than on tests with any kind of language component, such as the verbal section of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. In addition, throughout Genie's stay with the Riglers, they tested a variety of her brain functions and her performance on different tasks. For these they primarily used tachistoscopic tests, and during 1974 and 1975 they also gave her a series of evoked response tests.

Although the scientists did not yet know the reason for Genie's fear of cats and dogs the Riglers used their puppy in an effort to acclimate her, and after approximately two weeks she entirely overcame her fear of their dog but continued to be extremely afraid of unfamiliar cats and dogs. Marilyn worked with Genie to help overcome her ongoing difficulty with chewing and swallowing, which took approximately four months. She also tried to help Genie become more attuned to her body's sensations, and in late 1973 Curtiss recorded the first instance of Genie showing sensitivity to temperature. Although Genie deliberately did the least she possibly could in both Curtiss' and the Riglers' estimation, throughout her stay her physical health substantially improved.

After several months living with the Riglers, Genie's behavior and social skills improved to the point that she started going to first a nursery school and then a public school for mentally retarded children her age. The Riglers also taught her some basic self-help skills, including simple chores such as ironing, using a sewing machine, and preparing simple meals for herself. She made substantial progress with controlling herself both at home and in public, and although it was extremely hard to prevent her socially inappropriate masturbation she had almost entirely ceased it by the end of her stay. In February 1973 Curtiss recorded the first time Genie shared something with her, and while she continued to take things from other people her responses clearly indicated that she knew she was not supposed to.

Genie's father fed Genie as little as possible and refused to give her solid food, feeding her only baby food, cereal, Pablum, an occasional soft-boiled egg, and liquids. Her father, or when coerced, her brother, spooned food into her mouth as quickly as possible, and if she choked or could not swallow fast enough the person feeding her rubbed her face in her food. These were normally the only times he allowed his wife to be with Genie, although she could not feed Genie herself. Genie's mother claimed her husband always fed Genie three times a day but also said that Genie sometimes risked a beating by making noise when hungry, leading researchers to believe he often refused to feed her. In early 1972 Genie's mother told researchers that, whenever possible, at around 11:00 at night she would surreptitiously try to give Genie additional food, causing Genie to develop an abnormal sleep pattern in which she slept from 7 to 11 PM, woke up for a few minutes, and fell back asleep for an additional ​6  ⁄2 hours. This sleep pattern continued for several months after being taken away from her father.

On the same day, Genie went back to the hospital, the Riglers had Genie transferred to their home in Los Feliz. David Rigler said that he and Marilyn initially intended the arrangement to last for a maximum of three months, but Genie ultimately stayed with them for almost four years. When Genie moved in with the Riglers, Marilyn became her teacher, David Rigler decided to take over the role of Genie's primary therapist from James Kent, and the research team immediately resumed observations and evaluations. The Riglers remained Genie's primary caretakers throughout this time, but with the consent of Genie's mother and her psychologists, authorities designated John Miner as Genie's uncompensated legal guardian in 1972.

Sometime during early to mid-1972, the Riglers overheard Genie saying, "Father hit big stick. Father is angry." to herself, demonstrating that she could talk about her life before she had started to learn language. During the rest of her stay with the Riglers she would constantly repeat, "Father hit" to herself, and before the Riglers worked with Genie to understand the concept of death she often asked them where her father was, afraid that he would come to get her. Although she did not speak to others about her childhood often she gave researchers valuable new information when she did, and the scientists tried to get Genie to tell them as much as possible. As she learned more language, she gradually began to speak about her father and his treatment of her in greater detail.

In contrast to her linguistic abilities, Genie's nonverbal communication continued to excel. She invented her own system of gestures and pantomimed certain words as she said them, and also acted out events which she could not express in language. Initially she would only draw pictures if someone asked her to, but during her stay with the Riglers she began to use drawings to communicate if she could not explain something in words. In addition to her own drawings she often used pictures from magazines to relate to daily experiences, and for reasons the scientists never determined especially did so after encountering things that frightened her. Sometime during mid-1972, Marilyn observed that a magazine picture of a wolf sent Genie into a terror, after which the Riglers asked Genie's mother if she knew a possible cause for this reaction; she then informed them that her husband had acted like a dog to intimidate Genie, making the underlying reason for her fear apparent to the scientists for the first time.

As early as 1972 Genie scored between the level of an 8-year-old and an adult on all right-hemisphere tasks the scientists tested her on and showed extraordinarily rapid improvement on them. Her ability to piece together objects solely from tactile information was exceptionally good, and on spatial awareness tests her scores were reportedly the highest ever recorded. Similarly, on a Mooney Face Test in May 1975 she had the highest score in medical literature at that time, and on a separate gestalt perception test her extrapolated score was in the 95th percentile for adults. On several other tests involving right-hemisphere tasks, her results were markedly better than other people in equivalent phases of mental development; in 1977 the scientists measured her capacity for stereognosis at approximately the level of a typical 10-year-old, significantly higher than her estimated mental age. The scientists also noted in 1974 that Genie seemed to be able to recognize the location she was in and was good at getting from one place to another, an ability which primarily involves the right hemisphere.

Authorities initially arranged for Genie's admission to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where a team of physicians and psychologists managed her care for several months. Her subsequent living arrangements became the subject of rancorous debate. In June 1971, she left the hospital to live with her teacher from the hospital, but a month and a half later, authorities placed her with the family of the scientist heading the research team, with whom she lived for almost four years. Soon after turning 18, Genie returned to live with her mother, who decided after a few months that she could not adequately care for her. Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions for disabled adults, and the people running it cut her off from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse. As a result, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated, and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.

Linguists later discerned that, in January 1971, Genie showed an understanding of only her own name, the names of a few others, and about 15–20 words, and her active vocabulary at the time consisted of two phrases, "stop it" and "no more". They could not determine the extent of her expressive or receptive vocabulary at any point before January 1971, and therefore did not know whether she had acquired any or all of these words during the preceding two months. After observing Genie for some time they concluded that she was not selectively mute, and tests found no physiological or psychological explanation for her lack of language. Because her existing medical records also contained no clear indications of mental disabilities researchers determined that, due to her extreme isolation and lack of exposure to language during childhood, she had not acquired a first language.

By April and May 1971, Genie's scores on the Leiter International Performance Scale tests had dramatically increased, with her overall mental age at the level of a typical 4-year-9-month-old, but on individual components she still showed a very high level of scatter. Her progress with language accelerated, and doctors noticed that the words she used indicated a fairly advanced mental categorization of objects and situations and focused on objective properties to a degree not normally found in children. Around that time, when a minor earthquake struck Los Angeles, she ran frightened into the kitchen and rapidly verbalized to some of the hospital cooks she had befriended, marking the first time she sought out comfort from another person and the first time she was so readily verbal. However, she still had a hard time being with large crowds of people; at her birthday party, she became so anxious at all the guests present that she had to go outside with Rigler to calm down.

During the later part of Genie's stay at the hospital, she also started engaging in physical play with adults, and eventually began to enjoy giving and receiving hugs. She continued to exhibit frustration and have tantrums, but in response to situations that would have elicited similar reactions in most young children, and she could sulk for a long time despite receiving an object she liked. In April 1971, to the great surprise of doctors, she began attacking another girl because she felt she owned the hospital dress the other girl had on. This was both her first exhibition of a sense of possession over items she thought were hers but was otherwise impartial towards and the first time she directed her anger outwards, but she did not entirely stop harming herself when angry.

Beginning in January 1971 scientists conducted a series of neurolinguistic tests on Genie to determine and monitor the course and extent of her mental development, making her the first language-deprived child to undergo any detailed study of her brain. Genie's entire brain was physically intact and Shurley's sleep-studies found sleep patterns typical of a left-hemisphere dominant person, leading scientists to believe she was most likely right-handed. Over the following years multiple tests of her handedness supported this conclusion, as did observations of her in everyday situations. Based on their early tests, doctors suspected Genie's brain was extremely right-hemisphere dominant.

Prompted by this coincidence of timing, David Rigler led a team of scientists who sought and obtained a three-year grant from the NIMH to study Genie in May 1971. At the suggestion of Jean Butler, Genie's special education teacher at the hospital, they screened The Wild Child during their first meeting, and the scientists later said the film had an immediate and profound impact. The huge variety of suggestions for how to work with Genie made it extremely difficult for researchers to give the proposal a coherent direction. To the surprise of several scientists involved in the grant meetings, Rigler decided the primary focus of the study would be to test Chomsky and Lenneberg's hypotheses and selected UCLA linguistics professor Victoria Fromkin to head linguistic evaluation. The research team also planned to continue periodic evaluations of Genie's psychological development in various aspects of her life. From the time of her admission to Children's Hospital researchers had tried to keep her identity concealed, and it was around this time that they adopted the pseudonym Genie for her, referencing similarities between a genie coming out of a lamp without having a childhood and Genie's sudden emergence into society past childhood.

Soon after the NIMH accepted the grant proposal, in late May 1971, Susan Curtiss began her work on Genie's case as a graduate student in linguistics under Victoria Fromkin, and for the remainder of Genie's stay at Children's Hospital Curtiss met with Genie almost every day. Curtiss quickly recognized Genie's powerful nonverbal communication abilities, writing that complete strangers would frequently buy something for her because they sensed she wanted it and that these gifts were always the types of objects she most enjoyed. Curtiss concluded that Genie had learned a significant amount of language but that it was not yet at a usefully testable level, so she decided to dedicate the next few months to getting to know Genie and gaining her friendship. Over the following month, she and Genie very quickly bonded with each other.

In June 1971, Jean Butler obtained permission to take Genie on day trips to her home in Country Club Park, Los Angeles. Near the end of that month, after one of these trips, Butler told the hospital that she (Butler) might have contracted rubella, to which Genie would have been exposed. Hospital staff were reluctant to give foster custody to Butler and were very skeptical of her story, strongly suspecting she had concocted it as part of a bid to take over as Genie's guardian and primary caretaker, but decided that placing Genie in an isolation ward at the hospital could potentially be highly damaging to her social and psychological development, so they agreed to temporarily quarantine her in Butler's home. Butler, who was childless, unmarried, and at the time living alone, subsequently petitioned for foster custody of Genie, and despite the hospital's objections authorities extended Genie's stay while they considered the matter.

At first, Genie usually did not listen to anyone unless someone directly addressed her or if Curtiss played classical music on the piano, and if someone spoke to her she almost never acknowledged the other person and usually walked away after a while. In an effort to get Genie to listen to other people Curtiss began reading children's stories to her, and at first she did not seem to engage, but one day in mid-October 1971 Curtiss saw that Genie was clearly listening and responding to her. After that, she paid attention to people even when they were not speaking directly to or about her. She became somewhat more sociable in her interactions with people and became somewhat more responsive, although she still frequently showed no obvious signs that she heard someone. Her reactions to most stimuli became more rapid, but even by the end of her stay she sometimes took several minutes before giving a response to somebody.

Curtiss began thorough, active testing of Genie's language in October 1971, when she and Fromkin decided that her linguistic abilities were sufficient to yield usable results. Linguists designed their tests to measure both Genie's vocabulary and her acquisition of various aspects of grammar, including syntax, phonology, and morphology. They also continued to observe her in everyday conversations to gauge what pragmatics of language she acquired. The research team considered her language acquisition to be a substantial part of their larger goal of helping her to integrate herself into society, so although they wanted to observe what vocabulary and grammar Genie could learn on her own, out of a sense of obligation they sometimes stepped in to assist her.

Starting in the fall of 1971, under the direction of Curtiss, Victoria Fromkin, and Stephen Krashen—who was then also one of Fromkin's graduate students—linguists continued to administer regular dichotic listening tests to Genie until 1973. Their results consistently corroborated the initial findings of Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima. Researchers therefore concluded that Genie was acquiring language in the right hemisphere of her brain, and definitively ruled out the possibility that Genie's language lateralization was only reversed. Due to the lack of physiological problems with Genie's left hemisphere, they believed abnormal neurological activity in her left hemisphere—which they speculated came from her atrophied language center—blocked all language reception in her right ear but did not obstruct non-language sounds.

During the grant meetings in May 1971 some of the scientists, including Jay Shurley and David Elkind, voiced concern that the prevailing methods of research pursued scientific study at the expense of Genie's well-being and could cause love and attention to be contingent on her language acquisition. Shurley said that there was strong disagreement during the initial grant meetings and the atmosphere grew increasingly tense and bitter, especially noting that the later meetings excluded many of the people who had worked most closely with Genie. After May 1971 Elkind declined to participate in the study further, despite having personally known both the Riglers for several years, and in an interview years later he cited a desire not to be involved in a case which, in his view, prioritized scientific research over Genie's care. While Shurley acknowledged that the scientists at the center of the case were in a completely unprecedented situation, he also decided to minimize his involvement over these concerns and felt that by the conclusion of the study all of the scientists, including himself, had been guilty to varying degrees of using Genie as an object and putting themselves and their goals ahead of her and her mother's best interests.

In October 1970, when Genie was approximately 13 years and six months old, Genie's parents had a violent argument in which her mother threatened to walk out if she could not call her own parents. Her husband eventually relented, and later that day she left with Genie when he was out of the house and went to her parents in Monterey Park; Genie's brother, by then 18, had already run away from home and was living with friends. Around three weeks later, on November 4, Genie's mother decided to apply for disability benefits for the blind in nearby Temple City, California, and brought Genie with her, but on account of her near-blindness Genie's mother accidentally entered the general social services office next door. The social worker who greeted them instantly sensed something was wrong when she saw Genie and was shocked to learn her true age, having estimated from her appearance and demeanor that she was around six or seven and possibly autistic, and after she and her supervisor questioned Genie's mother and confirmed Genie's age they immediately contacted the police. Genie's parents were arrested and Genie became a ward of the court, and due to her physical condition and near-total unsocialized state a court order was immediately issued for Genie to be taken to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

By December 1970, Kent and the other hospital staff working with Genie saw her as a potential case study subject. That month David Rigler obtained a small grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to do preliminary studies on her, and began organizing a research team to submit a larger request. In January 1971 doctors administered a Gesell Developmental Evaluation and found Genie to be at the developmental level of a 1- to 3-year-old, noting she already showed substantial developmental disparities. The following month psychologists Jeanne Block and her husband Jack Block evaluated Genie, and her scores ranged from below a 2- to 3-year-old level to, on a few components, a normal 12- to 13-year-old level. Around the same time, doctors noted that she was very interested in people speaking and that she attempted to mimic some speech sounds.

At the time of Genie's admission to Children's Hospital there was wide discussion in both lay and academic circles about the hypotheses of Noam Chomsky, who had first suggested that language was innate to humans and distinguishes humans from all other animals, and Eric Lenneberg, who in 1967 hypothesized that humans have a critical period for language acquisition and defined its end as the onset of puberty. Despite the interest in these hypotheses, prior to Genie's discovery there had been no way to test them. Though ancient and medieval texts made several references to language deprivation experiments modern researchers labeled such ideas "The Forbidden Experiment", impossible to carry out for ethical reasons. Coincidentally the François Truffaut film The Wild Child, which chronicled the life of Victor of Aveyron in the years immediately after his discovery and the efforts of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard to teach him language and integrate him into society, also premiered in the United States only a week after Genie's rescue. The movie was a major success, and further heightened public interest in cases of children subjected to extreme abuse or isolation.

Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period he almost always strapped her into a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and she did not acquire language during her childhood as a result. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old.

In several of their publications, the scientists acknowledged the influence that Jean Marc Gaspard Itard's study of Victor of Aveyron had on their research and testing. Genie's development has also influenced perceptions of Victor and the case study on him. Both researchers working with Genie and outside writers noted the influence of the historical reports of language deprivation experiments, including accounts of the language deprivation experiments of Psamtik I, King James IV of Scotland, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The two ABC News stories on Genie compared her case to the Fritzl case, especially pointing out similarities between Genie's father and Josef Fritzl and the mental states of Genie and Fritzl's captive three grandchildren upon entering into society. The research team and outside scientists also contrasted Genie with a case in the 1950s of a girl, known by the name Isabella, whose first exposure to anyone besides her deaf non-speaking mother came at the age of 6 but who successfully acquired language and developed fully normal social skills within a year.