Language Deprivation

Language deprivation describes the absence of the linguistic stimuli a person needs during the critical period for acquiring language. Because deliberately depriving a person of language is unethical, controlled experiments on the topic are essentially impossible, a scarcity the writer Roger Shattuck called the forbidden experiment, so researchers instead study a small number of real cases alongside parallel studies that deprived animals of social stimuli. The documented human cases have informed the critical period hypothesis and the idea of a sensitive period in language acquisition. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/