Talk:Nell (film)

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The liguistic complaints about "Nell" seem complete, but they are not. For example, the writer deduces that there's three things we know about Nell's mother--that half her face is paralyzed, that she has had multiple strokes, and that she is aphasic. The writer then takes the partial paralysis and assumes that Nell's mother's aphasia is Broca's aphasia. But then the writer says these two things together doesn't "account for the resulting random sound omission in Nell's speech." At this point, the writer ignore the obvious, which is plainly stated 61-62 minutes into the movie by the Dr. Olsen character. "That's where the private language comes from -- it's twin speech." Nell had an identical twin, and twins tend to develop their own private language. That's why the play on which the movie is based was called "Idioglossia".

So, the movie accounts for all we find in Nell, although Dr. Olsen's methods and the way she reaches her conclusions are not very good linguistically speaking. So, the writer should fault Dr. Olsen's methods, but not the speech Nell came up with. It's twin speech based on how a mother talked with half her face paralyzed.

This is based on the linguistic complaints in the article "Nell", the article on "idioglossia", and on the movie "Nell".

67.72.98.89 04:48, 14 June 2006 (UTC)Charles Crossley, Jr.

I know it's just a movie, but they did make some effort to be accurate about educational psychology. Dr. Olsen studies autism. So she should know more about child language acquisition than she does. She does deal with language impairment, so would naturally think Nell's speech was some form of pathology -- the idea that Nell was a normal person who simply invented words wouldn't necessarily have occurred to her before she knew about May. (Idioglossias are also created by single children, not just twins, and may become full conlangs. However, unless Olsen studied linguistics, she probably wouldn't have any reason to know that.)

However, the point of the movie is that our culture places so high a value on language, especially spoken language, that many of us tend to assume that those who don't speak, or whose speech is different in some way, are defective mentally. IQ is based on the verbal scale to such an extent that people with impaired communication abilities are classified as retarded, autistic, or otherwise cognitively incapable, when in many cases there's no reason for such an assumption. There is no test to measure intelligence based solely on nonverbal skills and apititudes. If you don't have some form of language (sign or whatever), the assumption is that you're not human, not worth treating as a human being.

Nell is about objectification. It's about a group of people who see what they want to see ("wild child", etc.), to the point that they are blind to what's right in front of them. Everyone has their own ideas about Nell, and what they think they can make of her. Lovell's seen enough very early on to know she's a competent adult who can handle tasks of daily living. But competence isn't measured by her actions -- it's measured by her speech. Nell herself has to try to explain things in court before anyone outside of Lovell and Olsen even begins to grasp that she's more than a vegetable. I know none of these sentiments belong in the article. I'm just ranting. --Bluejay Young (talk) 07:53, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

This is a movie about curing a traumatized victim by showing her your genitalia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.81.8.174 (talk) 07:49, 10 May 2013 (UTC)