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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere that reintegration with human society mostly fails for feral children. Is it really a rescue if she dies at a young age, alone?

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in New Horizons Chomsky writes a bit about cases like this. IIRC a person raised like this has never been reintegrated and per Chomsky it's not really possible because the person will have developed a kind of consciousness that is fundamentally different from what we consider a 'normal' consciousness. Here's a video of him talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-30ZCHk1Ydk

I think it's pretty clear at this point that citing Chomsky in cases like this is like citing Velikovsky when discussing celestial mechanics. Wrong and inapposite.

you're probably right - somebody start teaching this girl english, she'll be fine! what's the father of cognitive science and modern linguistics know about anything?

Who's 'she'? Anyway, I think you ought to rethink your claim that Chomsky is the father of cognitive science and of modern linguistics.

> Who's 'she'?

The feral girl.

> Anyway, I think you ought to rethink your claim that Chomsky is the father of cognitive science and of modern linguistics.

He is one of the founders of cognitive science, and a major contributor to linguistics.

So his claim is factually true.

> what's the father of cognitive science and modern linguistics know about anything?

If he hasn't observed at least a dozen such children trying to learn language for a dozen years then he doesn't even know what are the things he doesn't know.

And guess what, I watched your video and even Chomsky admits that he only heard about few cases of feral children of which the one he talked about in detail means little because the girl was severely mistreated by parents in addition to growing up in isolation. And then he talked some more about other people inventing their own languages, but not living in complete social isolation.

Surely debatable. It's true that reintegration typically fails. Ferral children reveal how normal neural development requires early exposure to language and socialization. Most never acquire language.

We are truly social creatures.

Feral children usually suffered terrible trauma and abuse. Often they were disabled even before being abandoned. It's hard to separate those issues from the mere lack of being taught language. There are deaf people who weren't taught sign language until later in life, and they turn out ok.

Also she arguably got some socialization from the monkeys. I mean that's probably very imperfect. But it's very different than the cases of kids being locked up in rooms with no contact to anything.

This is truly heartbreaking.

I had no idea this had happened before or even that it could happen. Is this not a very rare event?

I'm guessing that the survival rate for feral children can't be very high, and even more so if the child gets to grow up.

Fascinating subject albeit very... discomforting.

> I had no idea this had happened before or even that it could happen. Is this not a very rare event?

You may be interested to learn about the founding of Rome. Check out the top of this poster: http://www.olympicartifacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1...

Well yeah, I'm familiar with it but it's not a modern event and I'm not sure how much of myth and how much of reality is mixed here.

That is a time that children have been raised by animals before. Dogs raising abandoned children is not unheard of even now, so the Roman story passes the sniff test for me.

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