填空题
Babies begin to develop language skills long before they begin speaking. Adults have a
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time learning new languages as they grow older, but
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have the ability to learn any language easily. Such studies show that, up to about
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months of age, babies can recognize all the sounds that make up all the languages in the world. Most kids speak in full sentences by age
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Children begin
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only to the sounds of the language they hear the most.
About
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sounds make up the languages spoken around the globe, but not every language uses every sound. To a native Japanese speaker, the letters
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and
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sound identical. So a Japanese speaker cannot tell "row" from "low," or "rake" from "lake. "
By around age 7, a baby"s brain has disposed of all the
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connections that the infant was born with. So, if you don"t start studying a foreign language until
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school, you must
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against years of brain development, and progress can be
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. A 12-year-old"s brain has to work much
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to forge language connections than an infant"s brain does.
Learning the baby"s brain might also help scientists design
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that learn languages as easily as babies do. Useful as computers are, they cannot
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and
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like people do.
Researchers have found that it is far
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for a language learner to talk with people who speak the language than to rely on
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CDs and DVDs with recorded conversations.
When infants watched someone speaking a foreign language on
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, they had a completely
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experience than they did if they watched the same speaker in real life.