考研英语阅读命题思路透析和真题揭秘(44)

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 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 l,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 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.

语言就像食物一样是人类的基本需求吗？没有语言是否就像没有食物一样会使孩子在生命的关键时刻饿死或者受到重创？根据弗雷德雷克二世在13世纪作过的那个强有力的实验，这是有可能的。他希望能够发现孩子在没有听到任何母语的时候会说什么，因此他嘱咐护士们都保持沉默。

所有参加试验的婴儿在第一年都死了。然而很显然除了缺少语言之外还有更多的原因，那就是缺少良好的母亲抚养。如果没有母亲的照料，初始的生命特别在第一年的生存能力将受到巨大的影响。

现在已经不存在弗雷德雷克规定的那种严格的情境。但是，一些孩子在语言表达能力方面仍然会落后于其他孩子。发生这种情况大部分都是应为孩子的母亲不够敏感、不会像婴儿发送各种语言信号，而这个时候的人类大脑能够很快地学习语言。如果这些敏感期被忽略掉，那么学习语言技能的最佳时间就被错过了，而这些孩子可能在也无法学会如何说话。鸟儿在合适的时期才能够学会唱歌和飞翔，但是一旦这些关键时期过去以后，这种学习进程就会变得非常缓慢和艰难。

专家们指出人们学习语言的阶段往往是通过一个固定的进程、并且在一段时期内，但是却有一些特例，那些孩子们掌握语言能力的时期较晚，但最后却变成了高智商的人。婴儿在12周的时候就会微笑和发出像元音一样的声音；8个月的时候孩子的词汇量就会达到3至50个词语。3岁的时候，孩子就能够掌握约1000个词并且用这些词语组成句子，4岁的时候孩子的语言和父母在语法上基本没有差别，只是语言风格还不一样。

近来的一些证据显示，婴儿天生就有说话能力。与猴子的大脑相比，人脑的特殊之处在于这是一个复杂的系统，能够使孩子把看到和感受到的东西联系起来，比如说把一个玩具熊和"玩具熊"这个词的发音联系起来。更加令人难以置信的是，婴儿的大脑能够从他听到的周围各种声音中找到语言的顺序，并且对其进行分析，从而把这种语言以新的方式进行组合和重新组合。

但是说话需要得到诱导，这取决于母亲与孩子之间的交流，在这种交流中母亲要从孩子的咿呀学语、手势和微笑中认出一些语言信号，并且对这些信号做出反应。如果母亲对这些信号不敏感，这么母婴交流就会变得无趣，因为孩子得不到鼓励，只会发出一些明显的信号。对于孩子发出的非语言的信号的敏感性是语言发展的至关重要之因素。