共用题干 第一篇Why Don ' t Babies Talk Like Adults?Over the past half-century,scientists have settled on tw...
第一篇
Why Don ' t Babies Talk Like Adults?
Over the past half-century,scientists have settled on two reasonable theories related to babytalk.One
states that a young child's brain needs time to master language,in the same way that it does to master other
abilities such as physical movement. The second theory states that a child's vocabulary level is the key fac-
tor. According to this theory,some key steps have to occur in a logical sequence before sentence formation
occurs.Children's mathematical knowledge develops in the same way.
In 2007,researchers at Harvard University,who were studying the two theories,found a clever way to
test them.More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the U.S.each year. Many of them no lon-
ger hear their birth language after they arrive,and they must learn English more or less the same way infants
do一that is,by listening and by trial and error. International adoptees don't take classes or use a dictionary
when they are learning their new tongue and most of them don't have a well-developed first language.All of
these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing hypotheses about how language
is learned.
Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker,Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27
children adopted from China between the ages of two and five years.These children began learning English
at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the task.Even so,just as
with American-born infants,their first English sentences consisted of single words and were largely bereft（缺
乏的）of function words , word endings and verbs. The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical
American-born children,though at a faster clip.The adoptees and native children started combining words in
sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes,further suggesting that what matters is not how old
you are or how mature your brain is,but the number of words you know.
This finding一that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddler-talk stage一
suggests that babies speak in babytalk not because they have baby brains,but because they have only just
started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations.Before
long,the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is
a gradual process.
But this potential answer also raises an even older and more difficult question.Adult immigrants who
learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child raised
as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a"critical period"for language development,
after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency.Yet we still do not understand this critical period or
know why it ends. What does the Harvard finding show?
参考答案: C
参考解析: 本题是推理判断题。第二段意思是：通过把被收养的国际儿童作为实验对象，采取不 同的培训方法来解释儿童语言习得的特殊途径。故选D。
由文章第三段第二句话可知这些儿童开始学习英语时要比美国本土学说话的孩子年龄大。
由文章第三段后半部分可知，与美国本土唯呀学语的儿童相比，被收养的中国儿童的 语言发展在其最初开口所说的单词，学习语言的方法和开始造句的阶段都相同。由该段倒数 第二句话“The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical American-born children, though at a faster clip.”该句中at a faster clip意思是“以更快的速度”。由此可知他们学习语言 的速度比本土的孩子快。故选A。
文章第四段讲述了哈佛大学研究人员的实验结果表明儿童说话时只能使用儿童话语 是因为他们需要时间来获得更多的词汇从而扩展对话形式。而从儿童话语过渡到成人话语形 式是一个渐进的过程。从最后两句话“Before long , the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on.Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process.”可以看出选C。
由文章最后一段倒数第二句话“Researchers have long suspected there is a ' critical period ' for language development , after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency.”可知 研究者猜想在人的语言发展过程中有一“关键期”，过了这一“关键期”，人的语言发展就不可 能达到流利的程度。故选C。
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