#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 how to
#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 plus
#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 tv

The intensive efforts by many people to restore her to a normal human environment and help her to learn English cannot be said to have been successful, though some limited linguistic development occurred. That was also appalling, but very different in its character: Genie was hardly exposed to any language use at all after her earliest months, and remained severely language-deprived even after her discovery and rescue. Nearly all linguists who are reading about the Amstetten case will be recollecting the story of Genie, the girl whose an insane father kept her strapped to a chair in almost total social isolation in a back room in a Los Angeles house from infancy until she was almost fourteen.

#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 plus

That much, plus watching television, was a linguistic environment adequate for language acquisition to take place naturally. Grotesque and terrible though the environment was in which Elisabeth Fritzl's children were raised, they had the company of their mother, who already spoke German, and as the years went by they had each other too, and also occasional contact with Elisabeth's brutal father (he was non-human in terms of empathy and morality, it seems, but human biologically and linguistically). They simply acquire the language no one really knows much about how this happens (adults who already know a language seem to mostly lose the ability to accomplish the same feat), but it certainly isn't a matter of language teaching. Talking to them in normal contexts, or even just talking to others when in their presence, is sufficient. No mother needs to teach her children language. Sometimes one despairs of ever dragging the general public's notions about language out of the 19th century. He also notes that media reports are saying that the children's mother 'taught them German'. The Fritzl kids mostly had each other, so you get twinspeak.

#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 how to

So she learned how to talk intelligently. (Some native speaker of German in the department at the time - I forget who - turned out to have had the same reaction.) Presumably her only interlocutor was her abductor, and apparently he used to have intelligent conversations with her about quite a range of topics. The thing that struck me was how eerily articulate she was, and how standard-sounding her German was, with only a hint of Austrian accent.

#Elisabeth fritzl now 2018 tv

By coincidence, I was in Berlin the night her interview was broadcast on Austrian TV, and got back to my hotel room and switched on the TV just as it started. My colleague Bob Ladd adds these remarks: ' It's worth making a comparison between these kids and Natascha Kampusch, the other Austrian dungeon child from two years ago. But perhaps it is worthwhile to say just this much: let us all try to ensure that the terrible psychological damage done to these poor children and their mother by the monster who imprisoned them is not now amplified by the promulgation of sensationalist nonsense likening them to animals. A point about reporting on their language seems almost too trivial to make. I am viscerally affected by the story each time I think about it, which is many times each day. I find the Amstetten story almost unbearably appalling. And semi-private speech modes used by children with siblings (e.g., identical twins with mostly or only their twin for company) are well known to developmental psycholinguists. 'If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate which seems to be extremely exhausting for them.'īeing able to say anything at all to other people, however exhausting the process, makes them already quite different from any non-human animal species on earth. They communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing.' Police chief Leopold Etz, 50, who has met the two boys, said: 'It is only half true that they can speak. But their form of communication is only partly intelligible to Austrian police officers. Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his brother Felix, five, learned to talk by watching a television in the dungeon where they were held with their mother Elisabeth Fritzl, 42. Animals do not have language, and these children do not communicate like animals. I suppose we should have expected it: the usual headline-writers' nonsense. The first report I have seen concerning the language skills of the imprisoned children involved in the horror story coming out of Amstetten, this Daily Telegraph story by Nick Allen, is headlined Dungeon children speak in animal language.