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 order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, 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 ( 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 the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
34. Which of the following can NOT be inferred from the passage?
[A] The faculty of speech is inborn in man.
[B] Encouragement is anything but essential to a child in language learning.
[C] The child’s brain is highly selective.
[D] Most children learn their language in definite stages.
[答案] B
[解题思路]
