Language deprivation experiments have been attempted several times through history, isolating infants from the normal use of spoken or signed language in an attempt to discover the fundamental character of human nature or the origin of language.
The American literary scholar Roger Shattuck called this kind of research study "The Forbidden Experiment" due to the exceptional deprivation of ordinary human contact it requires. Although not designed to study language, similar experiments on non-human primates utilising complete social deprivation resulted in psychosis.
Read more about Language Deprivation Experiments: In History, In Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words language, deprivation and/or experiments:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“All beauty, resonance, integrity,
Exist by deprivation or logic
Of strange position.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)