单选题
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 thirteenth 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 simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can puts 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, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy bear with the sound pattern toy bear". And even more incredible is the young brain"s ability to pick out an group in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognize the signals in the child"s babbling (咿呀学语), grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only tile obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child"s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
单选题
The purpose of Frederick Ⅱ"s experiment was ______.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】[解析] 根据文章第一段的最后一句话，Hoping to discover what language a child would speak ...，其中Hoping to表明了FrederickⅡ做实验的目的，即为本题正确答案。选项A和C的内容在文章中都没有提到，D的内容与原文不符，原文中只是说，语言是否像人类其他必需品一样，没有它孩子们在生命的某个关键时刻就会因此“饿死”或是被毁掉。FrederickⅡ的实验与这一问题的答案或许有联系，但并不是这个实验的目的，因此D也不正确。
单选题
The reason some children are backward in speaking is most probably that ______.
单选题
What is exceptionally remarkable about a child is that ______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[解析] 本题属“what”引出提问，后面需按具体的内容来回答，我们可以从文中倒数第二段最后一句说“甚至更不可思议的是年轻的脑子有能力从他周围混杂的声音中以新的方法选择语言顺序，分析，重新组合语言中的各种词”与C答案“他可以造自己的句子”相符合，故选C。我们也可以用排除法找到答案。A选项的内容是事实，但不是exceptionally remarkable的例证；B的内容在文章第五段的第二句话可以找到证据，但也不是关于小孩的特别；D的内容与文章中表达的内容有出入。原文第二段是说，without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected。接着在第三段又指出，有些孩子在说话方面比较迟钝是因为其母亲对他们所发出的信号反应不敏感，以致使他们的母亲忽视了这些敏感阶段，从而使孩子获得语言技能的最佳时间飞逝而过，因此D也不是正确答案，只有C符合文章内容，因而是正确答案。
单选题
Which of the following can NOT be inferred from the passage?