The Coolidge Presents Truffaut's The Wild Child with linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl, PhD

The Coolidge Corner Theatre's Science on Screen series kicks off 2010 with a special screening of François Truffaut's cinema classic The Wild Child (L'enfant sauvage). This deeply moving film, beautifully shot in black and white, is based on the true story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a feral youth found wandering naked and alone in the forests of southern France in 1798. Unable to speak, communicate, or function in society, the boy is taken to the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris, where he attracts the attention of a doctor named Jean Itard (played to great effect by Truffaut himself). Itard brings the boy, whom he christens Victor, into his home, where he attempts to teach him language and a sense of morality, with mixed results.

Joining us before the film for a talk on language acquisition is Dr. Judy Shepard-Kegl, a professor of linguistics at the University of Southern Maine, where she also directs the Signed Language laboratory. Dr. Shepard-Kegl is known internationally for her discovery and documentation of an emerging signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in Nicaragua. Her work ties into the film on many levels, including the fact that of the more than 4,000 deaf individuals she studies, 450 were language isolates at her first contact with them.