Ⅱ. Each of the passages below is followed by some quetions. For each question there are four
answers marked A,B,C, and D. Read the passages carefully and choose the answer to each of
the questions. Then mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding
letter in the brackets. (30 points)
1
Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life
can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thir-
teenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no
mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language
here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life
especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children
are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to
the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive
periods are neglected , the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so
easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and
hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but
there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventuaLly turns out to be of high IQ.
At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak sim-
ple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to
fifty words. At three he knows about l ,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four
his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special
about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, if the complex system which enables a
child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattem "toy-be

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