Wild Child

This was a very interesting movie because it is a great test of the critical period hypothesis.  The boy was around seven or eight years old and had not developed language during the critical period for children's knowledge of language to be activated.  The wild child shows that the critical period hypothesis is accurate in some ways.  One example is that we could see the boy really struggling in the movie just to finally say one word.  His innate ability to learn a language was not used; therefore, it was difficult for him to understand and communicate through language.  However, Victor was making progress especially in his ability to recognize letters and words that were associated with certain objects.  In my opinion, he was able to build vocabulary in his mind and understand what people were talking about but had no sense of grammatical rules and how to produce the words through speaking.  

I thought it was really sad how the townspeople reacted to him when he came to the village.  They put him in a barn with straw and treated him like an animal.  Rather than coming to visit him like it was a show, I thought people would think of what a tragedy it is that a real human being was abandon and left in the wilderness for eight years of his life.  It seems heartless that they would think of him as merely an animal from the woods.