Genie’s middle-finger points and signsA case study
Veronica Looney and Richard P. Meier*Gallaudet University, Washington / University of Texas, Austin
The ubiquity of index-finger pointing, and its early emergence in child devel-opment, has suggested that such pointing may be biologically-determined. However, cross-cultural variation in the form of pointing has also been noted, with some observations of middle-finger pointing. Here we examine the limited corpus of publically-available video data on the signs and gestures of Genie, a child who suffered severe social and linguistic deprivation throughout her childhood. These data suggest that Genie favored the use of the middle finger in points, in ASL signs that have an index-finger target handshape, and in object exploration. We speculate that middle-finger pointing in children may reflect an articulatory preference that is not limited to pointing, but that may encompass a range of manual behaviors.
Keywords: pointing, index finger, middle finger, Genie, American Sign Language (ASL)
Introduction
Index-finger pointing is a universal — or nearly universal — part of the human gestural repertoire that appears early in child development; on average, commu-nicative pointing emerges at 11 months (Butterworth, 2003). Kita (2003, pp. 2–3) observes that an important issue in understanding the emergence of pointing is “biological determinism and the putative universality of index finger pointing. The question is whether humans are biologically programmed to point with an extended index finger, making index-finger pointing universal across cultures.” He notes that infants produce index-finger pointing early on in the United States, Europe, and other countries and that this might suggest the biological basis for
such pointing. “However, in these cultures, adults also frequently use index-finger pointing.” Thus, he says, we can’t separate biological predisposition from environ-mental effects. He concludes that we need a study of the emergence of pointing in a society in which adults do not use index-finger pointing.
One source of the bias toward index-finger pointing may lie in the anatomy of the human hand. Povinelli and Davis (1994) demonstrated that, in the human resting hand, the index finger protrudes above the other fingers. This is not true for the common chimpanzee. Chimpanzees make limited use of pointing, but gen-erally do so with an open hand.
There are possible exceptions to the near-universality of index finger pointing in humans. Some cultures, for example the Kuna of Panama, favor lip pointing over index-finger pointing (Sherzer, 1973, 1983). Among Lao speakers, lip point-ing and manual pointing can co-occur (Enfield, 2001). Wilkins (2003) suggests the possibility that the Barai of New Guinea only use lip pointing, and may not use index-finger points at all. On the view of Cochet and Vauclair (2010, p. 99), obser-vations of lip pointing in other cultures “suggest that the use of the index finger for pointing is not universal and is, at least to some degree, socially transmitted to the infant.”
There is one report of a people, the Arrernte, an Aboriginal group of Australia, who sometimes use an extended middle finger in pointing gestures (Wilkins, 2003); certain discourse conditions may promote the use of middle-finger versus index-finger pointing in that culture. Kendon and Versante (2003, p. 115) note in passing that examples of middle-finger pointing appeared in their recordings of Neapolitan gesture. Butterworth (2003) suggests that middle-finger pointing is occasionally observed in Western infants. Matthew, Behne, Lieven, and Tomasello (2012) encountered rare instances of middle-finger pointing in their sample of 102 typically-developing British infants (ages 9–11 months); they did not sepa-rately analyze these forms but instead grouped them with index-finger points (as opposed to open-handed points).1 Wilkins (2003, p. 205) observed three young Arrernte children (ages 1;8, 2;2, and 3;0) who only used a form of middle-finger pointing, specifically “a loosely spread hand with middle finger raised and direct-ed”. [In adult use of middle-finger pointing among the Arrernte, the fingers other than the middle finger are more tightly folded in.] Seven months after Wilkins’s initial observations, the two older Arrernte children had abandoned middle-finger
1. In a study of the gestures used by adult subjects in interacting with a tabletop computer display, Epps, Lichman, and Wu (2006) also considered the middle-finger handshapes that they observed to be variants of the index-finger handshape. The frequencies of the middle-finger variants were not reported, nor were the forms of the middle-finger handshapes described.
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pointing in favor of canonical index-finger pointing; Wilkins was not able to make follow-up observations of the third child.
The extended middle-finger handshape occurs in a minority of signed lan-guages, including British Sign Language (Deuchar, 1984), but not ASL, where this handshape is taboo because of the obscene middle-finger gesture that is prevalent in American culture.2 For example, one sign for ‘vacation’ in British Sign Language has an extended middle-finger handshape (see: http://www.signbsl.com/sign/vacation). Middle-finger signs are generally infrequent even in those languages that have this handshape (Woodward, 1982; Ann, 1996).
We report here on the gesture and sign of Genie, a child well-known to science who was subject to severe social and linguistic isolation. Despite the attention that she received in the literature (Curtiss, 1977; Curtiss, Fromkin, Krashen, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974; Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974), there have been no systematic reports of her gesture or sign. As we will show, the very limited available video of her gesture and sign suggests that she favored middle-finger points and that she substituted the middle finger for the index finger in several ASL signs. Inasmuch as Genie likely had minimal gestural input during the long years in which she was isolated in a back bedroom of her family house in Los Angeles, the data on her gestural development may speak to the role of biological disposition versus environmental input in the emergence of pointing.
Methods
The tragic case of Genie has been extensively reported elsewhere (Curtiss, 1977). She was subjected to severe social and linguistic isolation by her abusive father; that isolation began when she was age 2;0 and persisted until 13;7. Curtiss (1977, pp. 37–38) reports that Genie often gestured in lieu of speaking. In February 1974 at age 16, she was introduced to signing, specifically to what Curtiss describes as “a system somewhere between Ameslan (American Sign Language) and Siglish (Signed English)”. Genie combined words and signs within a single utterance, but “also continued to use gestures of her invention”.
Video of Genie using gesture and sign language was obtained from two publi-cally-released documentaries about her, with less than 10 minutes of footage with
2. As noted in Ann (1996, p. 21), “it is physically impossible to fully extend the middle [finger] … while at the same time keeping the rest of the fingers closed.” Compare the extension of the middle finger when just it is extended versus the handshape in which all fingers are extended and spread, the 5-hand (5). Ann considers the middle-finger handshape to be a “bent” hand-shape, rather than an “extended” one.
Genie on camera in total. These documentaries are: 1) “Secret of the Wild Child”, A Nova Production by WGBH/Boston, Original airdate on PBS of October 18, 1994, and 2) “Wild Child: The Story of Feral Children”, Jonah Weston, Optomen Television, London: Discovery Communications Europe, 2002; broadcast in the United States on TLC Television Network, 2003.3 No further video data are readily available.4 Using ELAN, all signed utterances were transcribed by the first author, in consultation with the second author and with other signers (Deaf and hearing) in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. We adopted conservative criteria for identifying signs. In particular, repetitions associated with hesitations or false starts were not counted as separate tokens of a given sign.
Results
Genie’s signing is fairly crisply articulated but can be difficult to understand, whether because of a lack of contextual support or because of her hesitations. We identified 40 tokens of signs and/or gestures in the very small available sample. As we will show below, Genie substituted an extended middle finger for an extended index finger in 10 of the 40 sign/gesture tokens that we identified on the videos.
Consider the following utterance (51:38) in which Genie was apparently dis-cussing an incident in which her foster parents punished her.5 As is customary in the literature on signed languages, the English label for the ASL sign is indicated in capital letters. The bar and the abbreviation “hn” indicate that Genie produced a head nod simultaneously with her production of the sign under that bar. The handshape of each sign or gesture is noted below the gloss:
3. The Nova program was available from WGBH Boston in VHS format. It has also been post-ed on YouTube by a Japanese site called Everywhere Psychology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA. For convenience, the elapsed times that we report for examples of Genie’s signing are drawn from the YouTube video. The second documentary, produced by Jonah Weston and broadcast on the TLC network, has also been uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjZolHCrC8E.
4. The Special Collections of the University of California Los Angeles library house the David Rigler Collection of Research Materials Related to Linguistic-Psychological Studies of Genie: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0q2nc69q/. These materials include video re-cordings. Because of privacy and confidentiality concerns, access is only possible for purposes of “personal research”.
5. In example (1), the movement of the two hands of Genie’s production of WORRY is in phase; in the target sign, the movement is out-of-phase (or “alternating”). This is a common error type in young signers.
(1) ME4x, ME2x YOU [contacts addressee] THINK PULL-HAIR? WORRY RED POINT [to wall] H P off-camera MF baby-O? B MF MF
There are two important observations to make about this utterance: first, none of the signs or pointing gestures in this utterance has an index-finger handshape (1). Although the ASL target sign ME has an index-finger handshape, Genie’s first token has a variant of the H-hand (H, first and middle fingers extended) in which the thumb is opposed to the first and middle fingers. In her articulation of this to-ken, Genie contacted her upper chest four times. The handshape of the second to-ken of ME is difficult to discern, but appears to have middle-finger contact on the torso (and we have labeled the handshape as a P-hand, P). Secondly, Genie’s pro-ductions of two lexical signs (THINK and RED), as well as of one pointing gesture, had an extended middle-finger handshape (here, ‘MF’). In Genie’s productions of THINK and RED, her middle finger was extended with all other fingers closed. In the pointing gesture to the wall, her middle finger was extended, whereas the other fingers were lax. For all three of these tokens, the target ASL handshape has an extended index finger (with all other fingers closed).
Signs with a substituted middle finger
Genie used an extended middle finger in place of an extended index finger in four ASL signs: THINK (2 tokens), RED, CRY, and SAY; see Figure 1. In her appar-ent version of the sign CRY, the middle finger on her dominant right hand was extended and contacted her cheek; the other fingers were not fully closed. She also produced what may be an initialized sign PAPA6, in which the middle finger of the P-hand (P) contacts the forehead; during the production of this sign she also vocalized ‘father’ (34:45). The signs THINK, RED, and CRY were produced in the same videotaping session (51:45–52:30). As indicated by her hair and dress, Genie produced the sign SAY on a different, earlier occasion (TLC 9:00) than her productions of THINK, RED, and CRY. Thus, the middle-finger substitutions were not limited to a specific moment in time.
Genie produced at least one sign with an index-finger handshape, specifically, the sign WHERE (41:34).7 She also correctly produced the sign MUST (35:54),
6. In an initialized sign, the sign has the handshape that corresponds to the first letter of the fingerspelling of the English translation.
7. In this video clip, Genie was receiving sign instruction. Note that the instructor models the sign SATURDAY with an outward palm orientation; Genie’s imitation — with an inward palm — is in fact the standard ASL pronunciation. It’s unclear whether Genie’s form should be viewed as a spontaneous correction of the instructor or as an imitation error; see Shield and Meier
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which has a crooked index finger (an X-hand, X). In general, her handshape production appears to be good: she produced a variety of handshapes including a B-hand (B, in the sign we have identified as WORRY), a clawed-5 handshape (in a sign that could be MONSTER), a fisted S-handshape (S, as in CAN and SATURDAY), and an 8-hand (8, as in the signs LIGHT and AWFUL, in which the middle finger is initially opposed to the thumb, but the other fingers are extended). We did not detect other handshape errors, aside from the ones mentioned above.
Pointing gestures
We identified two types of points in the video data: 1) Points to self and 2) Middle-finger points to other locations. In the single utterance in which she points to herself (see example 1 above), she initially produces a pointing gesture that has a handshape as in the ASL sign NO in which the first and middle fingers are opposed to the thumb. In Genie’s production the first and middle fingers contacted the tor-so; there were four short movements to contact at the torso. These four movement cycles were followed by a short pause and then another production of what again appears to be a sign or gesture for ‘me,’ but now with a more P-like handshape that appears to have middle-finger contact against her torso. The only other first-per-son sign in the data was an imitative production of the Signed English pronoun I
(2012) for analysis of palm orientation errors produced by native-signing children with autism spectrum disorder.
Figure 1. Genie’s production of a middle-finger substitution in the sign THINK, which has an index-finger handshape in ASL (Screen shot from Nova’s Secrets of a Wild Child, WGBH Educational Foundation)
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(41:34), which is not a pointing sign and which has an I-handshape (I, little finger extended, all others fisted).
We identified five tokens of middle-finger points: in one instance she pointed to the wall behind her; again see example (1). In another she pointed to a picture of a log that she was showing to Susan Curtiss. In a discussion in which she was seemingly expressing a desire to visit her father (34:14), she pointed to a unspec-ified location that might be glossed as ‘over there’; this point had two outward movement excursions; see Figure 2. Lastly, in a conversation with an unidentified man on a beach (26:45), she produced two tokens of ‘you’ to her interlocutor. A possible sixth token of middle-finger pointing occurs when Genie points to an object off screen in an interaction with David Rigler (31:52). There are no clear instances of index-finger pointing in this sample, although we have identified one possible candidate: LIGHT POINT[to light on camera] ‘light there’ (34:14). Note however that Genie’s handshape in this production is very difficult to discern be-cause she was so close to the camera.
Object manipulation
We identified three possible examples of Genie interacting with objects in which she touches the object with an extended middle finger. In the clearest example (27:23), she peers closely at a toy bus and taps its surface with her middle finger; her other fingers were open and spread. In this example, Genie was not producing
Figure 2. Genie’s production of a middle-finger point; note that her other fingers are not fully closed in this instance (Screen shot from Nova’s Secrets of a Wild Child, WGBH Educational Foundation)
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a communicative gesture; in fact, at that moment in time, she did not appear to be interacting with anyone.
Discussion
The limited data available to us suggest that Genie showed a systematic preference for middle-finger handshapes over index-finger handshapes; that preference appears to have been true of pointing signs, lexical signs, and possibly object manipulation. Her substitution of the middle finger for the index finger in ASL signs and in points is surprising. On the physiological model of ease of articulation developed in Ann (1996), Genie substituted a relatively hard handshape for one that is easy. We see no evidence from the video data of a problem in Genie’s fine motor control that would account for this substitution. Genie’s use of the middle finger is unlikely to have been modeled by her therapists; in fact, one suspects that they attempted to correct her, inasmuch as the use of the middle-finger handshape is taboo in American culture.
Typically, the extended index-finger handshape is one of the earliest hand-shapes to be acquired by signing children; this is one reason that Genie’s particular handshape errors are surprising. A review of the literature on early sign develop-ment (Marentette & Mayberry, 2000) found that children’s earliest handshapes draw from a small set: specifically, 5 (all fingers extended and spread), A (A, a fisted handshape), index (index finger only extended from the fist), A (fingers ex-tended but together), and baby-O (index and thumb opposed; other fingers fisted). When children make errors, they tend to substitute one of these basic handshapes for the adult target handshape. In an extensive study of one child’s acquisition of British Sign Language from the age of 19 to 24 months, the index-finger handshape was one of the most frequently and most successfully used handshapes (Morgan, Barrett-Jones, & Stoneham, 2007). Deaf children who have innovated their own language-like systems — so-called home signers — draw from a set of basic hand-shapes that is similar to the early handshapes of children learning established sign languages (Goldin-Meadow, Mylander, & Butcher, 1995). Cheek, Cormier, Repp, and Meier (2001) reported no instances of an extended middle-finger handshape in 634 sign tokens. In their data, 22 distinct handshapes were produced by four deaf children of deaf parents; the children’s ages ranged from 8 to 17 months.
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Genie’s apparent preference for the extended middle-finger handshape in pointing seems consistent with a hypothesis that there are individual differenc-es in the development of pointing, particularly in the choice of pointing hand-shapes.8 Unlike other children who may opt early for middle-finger points (e.g., the Arrernte children observed by Wilkins, 2003), Genie’s use of middle-finger pointing may have persisted because of the social isolation that she experienced. However, the available data do not allow us to determine when Genie’s preference for the middle-finger handshape emerged. It’s possible that Genie’s overuse of the middle finger was simply the unusual error of an adolescent learner of ASL.
Importantly, Genie’s use of the middle finger in signs, pointing, and object exploration raises the possibility that the middle-finger points that have occasion-ally been observed in children may reflect an articulatory preference that extends beyond pointing behaviors. Thus, the early use of the middle finger in the point-ing of some children may not be the result of the child simply making an atypical selection among the possible pointing handshapes. However, at this point, we can’t explain why Genie formed this handshape preference. We do not know whether there is an explanation for her preference that is rooted in motor development. We also do not know whether other children show the same pattern as Genie. Nor do we know whether Genie’s unusual handshape preference somehow reflects the abuse she endured. We can only speculate.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank Susan Curtiss for email discussion of Genie’s signing.
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About the authors
Veronica Looney received her B.S. in Communications Sciences and Disorders from The University of Texas at Austin in May 2014. She joined the master’s program in Speech-Language Pathology at Gallaudet University in fall 2014. She is particularly interested in how language disorders may affect the knowledge, learning, and use of ASL and other signed languages of the Deaf.
Richard P. Meier is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. His 1982 doctorate is from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests lie in the structure of signed languages, and in their acquisition as first languages.
Authors’ addresses
Veronica LooneyDepartment of Hearing, Speech, and Language SciencesGallaudet University800 Florida Ave., NEWashington, DC 20002–3695USA
