Nell

This week in class we learned about all the different stages of development. We talked about all of the different things that occur at each stage. The first thing that came to mind was the story of Nell. Nell is a girl that lives in a log cabin in the middle of the woods. She has lived there her entire life with her mother, until her mother died. She was completely isolated from everyone and everything until a group of researchers discovered her existence. Nell had a different way of communicating. She knew how to speak, but she could not speak like everyone else. She had developed her own language. Because she had not had any human contact in such a long time, she continued to act in child like ways. Eventually they tried to teach her how to live in the real world. She went through some of the stages that a child would have gone through. You can see some of these in the trailer, such as the childish gesture of imitation. A young boy sticks his tongue out  at her and she imitates him by sticking her tongue out at him. The movie does a really good job of showing what happens when children do not go through all of the different stages of development.

Nell