Language and Infants

How important is languageto young children?Is language,like food,a basic human need without which a childat a critical period of life can be starved and damaged?Judging

from the drastic experimentof Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenthcentury it may be.Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heardno mother tongue he told

the nurses to keep silent.

Within the first year,allthe infants died.People realized clearly in this case that there was more than deprivationof language._______(46)Without good mothering,in the first

year of life especially,thecapacity to survive is seriously affected.

Today no such cruel deprivationis allowed to exist that ordered by Frederick.Nevertheless, some children are stillbackward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that

the mother is insensitiveto the cues and signals of the infant,whose brain is programmed to mop up languagerapidly.There are critical times,it seems,when children learn

more readily._______(47)Abird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time,but the process is slowand hard once the critical stage has passed.

Linguists learn thatspeech milestones are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but thereare cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns

out to be of high IQ(Intelligence Quotient).At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds;attwelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple

commands;at eighteenmonths he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words._______(48)

Recent evidence suggeststhat an infant is born with the capacity to speak.What is special about Man's brain,comparedwith that of the monkey,is the complex system which

enables a child to connectthe sight and feel of,say,a teddy-bear with the sound pattern"teddy-bear"._______(49)

But speech has to betriggered,and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child,wherethe mother recognizes the cues and signals in the child's

babbling,clinging,grasping,crying,smiling,andresponds to them._______(50)Sensitivity to the children's non-verbal cues is essentialto the growth and development of language.________（50）

A.At three he knows about1,000 words which he can put into sentences,and at four his language differs fromthat of his parents in style rather than grammar.

B.What was missing wasgood mothering.

C.Lots of informationabout benefits of baby signing and best ways to go about it can be found.

D.Insensitivity of themother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouragedand sends out only the obvious signals.

E.If these sensitiveperiods are neglected,the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they mightnever be learned so easily again.