re:would they have developed a language if held in silent isolation? Guess it would be an illegal experiment.
illegal would be the least of it... are you a closet psychopath? it would seem you'd have to be to suggest such an experiment.
there have been, throught the ages, 'jungle boys', children accidently left, lost, abondon, who have grown up with out human contact. when 'recovered', these children, never develop language beyond the grunts and noises they learned while living with out the benefits of human contact.-the experiment has been done (accidentaly)
similarly, a young man who was born with sever catteract, and other eye problems, and learned to live as 'blind'(he could see light/dark/shadows), was subject to surgery that removed the catteracts, repaired eye muscles, and was then fitted with glasses.. His eyes worked. but he never learned to see.. he never developed 3D focus, he could not tell a cat from a dog, or horse from a cow (with out touching them)
he 'stepped over shadows on the street as if they were obsticles.. he couldn't 'get' that cars looked smaller when further away.. and kept mistaking them for toys..
the case was 'written up' most recently by Oliver Sacks, (don't have the book title handy), but Dr. Sacks points out, this kind of surgery was been tried before, and the results are always the same.(and there was a broadway play 10 year ago on the same case (only the play turned the man into a woman, and took other dramatic licence.)
children not only learn to talk, they learn to see...
because of the past failures, 'corrective surgery' for blindness is limited to people who have developed sight (and then lost it)- or children under the age of 5. we don't need to experiment on children to learn what we already know.
