who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

343A few cases of “wolf children” from recorded human history would beparticularly interesting to investigate in this context, but no data is available on thismatter that I am aware of. The only possibility to discover whether questioning behaviordepend s on learning at an early age would be to check the case of language developmentof a girl known as “Genie”.Genie was found wandering together with her mother in 1970 in the Californianstreets. It was found later that her father imprisoned her from early infancy and kept herfrom any exposure to human language. She was about thirteen years old and could notspeak. Later Genie acquired limited speech and could communicate with others. Herspeech never reached the normal human capacity of syntactic complexity, and hersentences were no longer than 2-4 words. Derek Bickerton put Genie’s language in thecategory of “protolanguage” together with the language of children under two, apelanguage and pidgin languages.Most importantly for our discussion, Genie failed to learn to ask questions: “Shehad great difficulty in formulating questions – when she wanted to know the name ofsomething, she gestured or pointed at it but did not learn to ask its name” (Wills,1993:288). As tests made it clear that Genie had a normal intelligence, her failure to learnhow to ask questions can only be explained by the fact that she was not exposed toquestions and language behavior in the critical period.• Questions, apes and childrenAnother important sphere related to the question phenomenon is the comparativestudy of apes' and children's cognitive and linguistic abilities. There are principaldifferences on this matter among different scholars. One group of scholars (led by theexperiments conducted by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and associates) claims the mentalabilities of apes are comparable to the mental abilities of a 2 – 2.5 years old human child.Another group of scholars dismisses such claims.Comparing apes’ and children’s cognitive abilities, scholars mostly use testsbased on understanding questions and orders and replying (and acting) on themappropriately. As Savage-Rumbaugh and her associates’ experiments suggest, bonoboKanzi can understand human questions and requests roughly as well as a human childaged two-and-a-half years old. Can we conclude that Kanzi’s intellectual development iscomparable to a child aged two-and-a-half years old? Despite the fact that theachievements of Kanzi and Panbanisha in the comprehension of the human language arevery impressive, I think it is a bit controversial to make a judgment about children’s andapes’ mental abilities on the basis of understanding and answering questions and requestsonly. Two- and three-year-old children could give the same kind of replies to questionsand requests as enculturated apes, but we should not forget that, unlike the apes, childrenask an array of questions at that age, and even before that age. The strength of humanintelligence seems to be in the uniting of individual brains into the “mental web” of ourshared knowledge, and the ability to ask and answer questions seems to be the crucialelement of this unique mental cooperation.So, unlike the apes, children from an early age possess the human ability toformulate and ask questions to enlarge their knowledge by referring to the cognition of