题目内容
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 1, 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 analyze, 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, 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.
The purpose of Frederick II's experiment was ______.
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
编制工程建设竣工决算报告的主要内容由竣工决算报表、竣工决算报告说明书、竣工工程平面示意图和工程造价比较分析四部分组成。 ()
"You know so much about literature. It's a pity you failed your degree," Harry said, "You
Because some teachers believe that memorization and learning are ______, they may tell you
Moviegoers may think history is repeating itself this weekend. The summer's most anticipated film, Pearl Harbor, which has opened recently, painstakingly recreates the Japanese attack that drew the United States into World War Ⅱ. But that isn't the film's only reminder of the past.
Harbor invites comparison to Titanic, the biggest hit of all time. Like Titanic, Harbor heaps romance and action around a major historical event. Like Titanic Harbor attempts to create popular global entertainment from a deadly real life. Like Titanic, Harbor costs a pretty penny and hopes to get in even more at the box office.
Both Titanic and Pearl Harbor unseal their tales of love and tragedy over more than three hours. Both stories center on young passion, triangles of tension with one woman and two men: In Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Billy Zane compete for the love of the same woman, a high society type played by a British actress named Kate (Winslet). In Harbor, two pilots (Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett) fall for the same woman, a nurse played by a British actress named Kate (Beckinsale).
The scenes of peril also have similarities. Harbor has a shot in which soldiers cling for dear life as the battleship USS Oklahoma sinks. The moment is recalled of the Titanic's climactic sinking scene in which DiCaprio and Winslet hang from the ocean liner as half of the ship vertically plunges into the water. In Harbor, one of its stars floats atop a piece of debris in the middle of the night, much like Winslet's character does in Titanic. And the jaw-dropping action of Titanic is matched by Harbor's 40 minute recreation of Dec. 7, 1941 attack on the United States' Pacific Fleet.
Both films spent heavily on special effects. Harbor director, Michael Bay, for example, says he kept salaries down so more could be spent on the visuals. Both movies even shot their ship sinking scenes at the same location: Fox Studios Baja in Mexico.
Harbor's makers have even taken a Titanic like approach to the sound track. The film includes one song. There you will be, performed by country music superstar Faith Hill. Titanic, which is one of the best selling soundtracks of all time, also had only one pop song: Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. "If Harbor becomes a major moneymaker, filmmakers may comb history books searching for even more historical romance action material," says a critic.
What are the two things that the author of this article tries to compare？
微信支付 
支付宝支付