Quote:
Originally Posted by Ekco
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If we weren't burdened by ethics... tests like this could be done lol.
there is a story about one kid who got locked in a room by religious parents who were attempting to find the first human language like Tower of Babel story shit by preventing the kid from having any contact with the outside world or teaching it anything not to let a tragedy go to waste linguist and psychologists learned a lot from that case.
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Actually, it's been done, and there's even a movie of it: L'Enfant sauvage (
the Wild Child). (There have been other "wild children" also, but this one is the most studied.)
Some true asshole back in the late 1700's tried to kill his very young son, and left him in the woods to die. The kid didn't though: it grew up, and was later captured. People studied him while trying to "civilize" him.
This is no happy Tarzan story though: what they learned is that when you delay key milestones in human development, it's impossible to recover. Because the kid was wild for so much of his adolescence, he was basically an animal for the rest of his life.
TLDR; If you lock a kid in his room, he won't speak the universal tongue ... he'll just never speak (and never think like a human either).