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 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 utters 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 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, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddybear with the sound pattern  "teddybear". And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order 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 recognizes the signals in the child's babbling, 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 the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.1.  The purpose of Frederick's experiment was ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[参考译文] 语言是否像食物一样是人类的一项基本需求?没有食物,孩子在生命的关键时刻就会饿死或是受到损害。从十三世纪弗雷德里克二世所做的影响重大的试验来判断,这是可能的。希望发现孩子在没听过母语的情况下,会说什么语言,他让保姆缄默不语。所有婴儿出生不到一年就都夭折了。但是很明显,夭折的原因不是剥夺了语言,而是失去了母亲的呵护。没有母亲悉心的呵护,尤其是婴儿出生的第一年,其成活率会受到严重的影响。
   今天,像弗雷德里克下令严厉剥夺孩子语言的现象已经不复存在了。然而,一些孩子说话仍然很迟缓。通常原因是母亲对婴儿的示意信号无动于衷,而孩子这时候大脑正处于快速学习语言的状态。如果这些关键时期被忽略,就错失了习得技能的理想时间,他们可能就再也不会如此容易学到东西了。一只小鸟在适当的时间可以快速地学习唱歌和飞翔,但是一旦错过了关键期,学习过程就会变得缓慢困难。
   专家表示,言语的各个阶段是有固定顺序的,在一定的年龄达到,但也有若干情况,某些孩子开始说话晚,结果其智商却很高。十二周的孩子会笑,发出元音似的声音;十二个月的孩子可以说简单的词,懂得简单的命令;十八个月的孩子可拥有三到五十个单词;三岁的孩子懂得大约一千个单词,并且能够组成句子:四岁的孩子的语言与父母的语言只是在风格上而不是在语法上有所差异。
   最近的数据证明,婴儿生来就具有讲话的能力。与猿猴的大脑相比,人脑的特殊就在于它是一个复杂的系统,比如说,能使婴儿在见到或摸到泰迪熊时,把“泰迪熊”与这个词的发音联系在一起,甚至更不可思议的是,幼小的大脑能从周围喧嚣声中听出语言表达的某种命令,用种种新奇的方式对某个语言的成分进行分析、组合以及重新组合。
   但是言语必须经过诱发,这主要依赖孩子与母亲之间的交流,母亲能够辨认出孩子的咿呀声、抓东西还有微笑所发出的信号,并能进行回应。母亲对孩子的上述信号持冷漠态度会减弱这种相互作用,因为这会使孩子受挫,只发送出明显的信号。母亲对孩子非言语信号的敏感是孩子语言发展的基础。
细节题。短文第一段中指出to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue,由此可知Frederick实验的目的是:假设孩子在听不见母语的情况下,会说什么语言。故选项B正确。