Directions: in this section there are 3 passages followed by multiple-choice questions. Read the passage and then mark your answers on your answer sheet.

Passage three

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 Federick 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 Federick. 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, inadequate responses from mother dull the language interaction between mother and child because the child gets discouraged. If these sensitive periods are neglected and the ideal time for acquiring skills passes, 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 put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in 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 order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new sentences.