Text: “What Happens if a Child Is Never Exposed to Language?”

Excerpt from the text: “Children learn the language(s) that they hear and see around them at a young age, but what happens if a child just never has any linguistic input, spoken or signed? Although a scientific study around this question would undoubtedly be fascinating, it would also be extremely unethical, so much so that the cultural historian Roger Shattuck has called it The Forbidden Experiment.”

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/children-not-exposed-to-language-nicaraguan-sign-language-wild-children-and-the-forbidden-experiment.html

This article (and this particular area of language research) is a great fit for May 2022 TOK essay prescribed title #6. There are a lot of different angles that overlap with the idea of how ethics can prevent certain things from being researched at the cost of knowledge.

Check this page for additional information on the key words and phrases in this prescribed title.