Learning is an essential process for living things to acquiring necessary skills and behaviours. Scientists have already found t

admin2010-01-15  32

问题      Learning is an essential process for living things to acquiring necessary skills and behaviours. Scientists have already found that there is a critical period for learning in man and animals. Once the right time for learning a skill or a certain behaviour has passed, this skill or behaviour can never be properly learned.
     Thorpe of Cambridge University found that the chaffinch has to learn most of its songs, and that this learning has to occur during the early weeks of the bird’s life and also during the first spring. If the bird is handreared and isolated from other birds from the time of hatching, it sings only very simple songs and it never learns the song of its species correctly.
     That we speak our own language perfectly and the languages we learn later imperfectly also depends on learning this skill at the right time. The brain develops in such a way that it is ready to learn to speak between the ages of about ten months and ten years. Languages learned later are not spoken perfectly. The ability to speak a language is a mixed motor and sensory skill. It is necessary to hear all the sounds, the subtle differences between similar but not identical sounds, the rhythm and lilt of the language. One has also to work tongue, throat, and lips, to control breathing. All this has to be managed at one and the same time. From some time after birth until the age of six or seven, normal children can learn all this perfectly, and without much difficulty they can learn two or even three languages at the same time, without muddling them up. But later, most of us cannot acquire this skill. We may learn to write and read the new language perfectly; but to acquire the right inflexion and the accent and the ability to speak so that no one can detect that the language is not our mother-tongue hardly ever occurs.
     But those of us who still want to learn foreign languages after these early milestones have been passed need not worry; for though we may not learn to speak a new language like the natives, we know from thousands of examples that we can go on learning languages beyond the age of eighty. There are so many activities adding to the simple word "learning" that although some of the processes become less efficient with ageing of the brain, our actual experience of learning helps us in learning new material.
According to the passage, the critical period for learning a language is ______.

选项 A、at the age of ten months
B、between the ages of about ten months and ten years
C、at the age of ten years
D、from some time after birth to six or seven years

答案D

解析 第三段说人的大脑在人十个月和十岁之间处于一种状态,使人可以学会一种语言,又说语言能力是一种感觉和运动的混合能力,一个人从出生之后一段时间到六、七岁这一段时间可以完全地掌握一种语言,但这段时期过后大部分人就不再具有这种能力,综合分析这一段的全部内容可知此题应选D。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/ibbMFFFM
0

随机试题
最新回复(0)