Kent came away from his first encounters with Genie extremely pessimistic about her prognosis on all fronts. Children's Hospital staff did not keep detailed records of Genie's early linguistic progress, and she only rarely spoke during this time, so there was little data on Genie's language for the first 6 months of her stay. When Kent met with Genie for the first time, he initially observed no visible reactions from her but eventually found that she seemed afraid of a small puppet. When she threw it on the floor Kent pretended to be concerned and said, "We have to get him back", and was startled when she repeated the word "back" and nervously laughed. When they subsequently played with the puppet she repeated "back" several times, and when Kent said, "The puppet will fall" she repeated the word "fall". Apart from her tantrums, the times she played with this and similar puppets accounted for most of the few instances she made any outward expression during the early part of her stay. Within weeks of being admitted to Children's Hospital Genie became much more responsive to nonverbal stimuli, although at first her own demeanor remained devoid of nonverbal signals. During the first months that she lived at the hospital, she gradually began to express more of her emotions outward. After a fairly short time, Genie's nonverbal communication skills became exceptional. Everyone who worked with her said she had an indescribable way of eliciting emotions, and she seemed able to communicate her desires without talking. Genie's early receptive and expressive vocabulary acquisition was slow, although from the outset people observing her believed her linguistic performance was significantly behind her linguistic competence. Within a month she became far more responsive to other people talking, but doctors were unsure whether she was responding more to verbal or nonverbal stimuli. After a month she started attempting to mimic speech, albeit very infrequently, and soon after hospital staff observed her saying "stopit", which she treated as one word, as a phrase of ritual play. Even at this phase she distinguished the names of similar objects, even if they were unfamiliar, but never overgeneralized words for individual objects. If she encountered something unfamiliar she always sought the correct word or phrase instead of attempting to apply a word from her existing vocabulary, and could determine the names of objects based on their uses. Psychologists Jack Block and Jeanne Block evaluated Genie in February 1971 and put her language below the two-year-old level on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. During the next month her vocabulary acquisition began to accelerate at a progressively more rapid pace, with observers putting her active vocabulary at over 100 words.