US police have charged a woman after her emaciated eight-year-old daughter was discovered locked in a cupboard wrapped only in a urine-stained blanket.

Lauren Calhoun was just 3ft and weighed just 25lbs. She has been locked in the cramped lice-infected cupboard at the mobile home in Dallas, Texas, where she lived with her parents and five siblings for four months for allegedly "eating to much".

Police and child protection officials were tipped off by a neighbour earlier this week.

The girl had the communication skills of a three-year-old. She told investigators she was two years old and could not identify the sun or television.

Police said that the girl's eyes were sunken, her hair was matted with dirt and that she smelled of human waste. Her teeth were broken, her stomach was bloated and her skin was scaly.

She is being treated in hospital for malnutrition. Her brothers and sisters, aged from 22 months to 11 years, are in emergency foster care. None of them showed signs of abuse or neglect although the home was filled with dirty clothes, trash and pet faeces, police said.

The girl's 11-year-old sister told investigators that her sister was often sent to the closet for "eating too much and running away". She said none of the other siblings were treated that way.

Laura's stepfather and mother, Kenneth Ray Atkinson, 33, and Barbara Calhoun Atkinson, 30, have been charged with injury to a child and are being held in the Dallas County Jail.

The stepfather allegedly told authorities that Laura had been locked in the closet for about four months. He is blaming his wife for the abuse.

A foster carer Diana Richard told the Dallas Morning News that if the couple did not want their children, they should give them to the state.

"That's a lot for a child to go through, psychologically and physically. There are people who want to take care of them," she said.

The couple are reported to have been under investigation by social,workers at least twice before, over allegations of a child being tied to a bed and children being neglected. But each time the family moved before investigators could question them and could not be located.