been criticized for Schaller's comparisons between Ildefonso and children like Victor or Genie. Carol Padden writes that Schaller does not do enough to highlight the basic differences between these cases: since Ildefonso was raised by a caretaker and in better conditions than Genie or Victor, and Ildefonso apparently functions socially (in a limited way) that was beyond the capability of these earlier case studies. However, Schaller did at least acknowledge this issue, saying that languagelessness is the only similarity between Ildefonso and the "wild children," and writing, "Deafness is not wildness, and the isolation of languagelessness alone is not the isolation of the woods or a basement or imprisonment on a chair" (Schaller p. 156). It has also been suggested that the characterization of Ildefonso as entirely "languageless" may be an oversimplification. In the same review, Padden speculates that "Schaller may have been teaching language to Ildefonso, but more accurately, she was teaching him how to map a new set of symbols on a most likely already existent framework of symbolic competence." The book has also been criticized for its lack of scientific rigor, especially that Schaller did not perform experiments on Ildefonso to collect data about his cognitive and communicative skills prior to teaching him language. The most strongly-worded critique along these lines might be by linguist Jürgen Tesak, who wrote the following in a review of the book for the journal Language: "The process of Ildefonso's language acquisition and his lingusitic skills are described unsystematically and anecdotally, if at all. Instead of data, [Schaller] presents many emotional intuitions and wild guesses about Ildefonso's 'languageless' mental world. Thus the claims made by the author in relation to language (acquisition) in Ildefonso do not have a sound empirical basis. [...] given the poor documentation of Ildefonso's language skills and the contradictory information on his linguistic, social, and communicative background, there is no other choice than to treat [Schaller's] book with a maximum of caution." Schaller makes no claims as to the scientific rigor of her results, however, and she states on the first page of her introduction, "I am neither deaf nor a linguist" (Schaller p. 17). Not all academics share Tesak's reservations; for example, Schaller's book has been cited by many cognitive scientists without any apparent skepticism. Others have countered that Schaller and the topic of languageless adults have been excluded from the field of linguistics. Temple Grandin, a