Задание
Прочитай текст и выполни задания 12–18. В каждом задании запиши в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному варианту ответа.
The language instinct
The social skills of small children are manifest not only in vision but also in the auditory domain: spoken language comes to them just as easily as face perception. As Steven Pinker famously noted in his best-selling book "The Language Instinct": "Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface." This statement should not be misunderstood: obviously, babies are not born with a full-blown lexicon and grammar, but they possess a remarkable capacity to acquire them in record time. What is hardwired in them is not so much language itself as the ability to acquire it.
Much evidence now confirms this early insight. Right from birth, babies already prefer listening to their native language rather than to a foreign one — a truly extraordinary finding which implies that language learning starts in utero. In fact, by the third trimester of pregnancy, the baby is already able to hear. The melody of language, filtered through the uterine wall, passes on to babies, and they begin to memorise it.
It was long thought that language acquisition does not begin until one or two years of age. Why? Because a newborn child does not speak and therefore hides its talents. And yet, in terms of language comprehension, a baby's brain is a true statistical genius. To show this, scientists had to use a variety of original methods. These studies revealed how much infants already know about language. Right at birth, babies can tell the difference between most vowels and consonants in every language in the world.
But that's not all: babies quickly start to learn their first words. How do they go about identifying them? First, babies rely on prosody, the rhythm and intonation of speech — the way our voices rise, fall, or stop, thus marking the boundaries between words and sentences. Another mechanism identifies which speech sounds follow each other. Again, babies behave like smart statisticians. They realise, for example, that the syllable /bo/ is often followed by /t^l/. A quick calculation of probabilities tells them that this cannot be due to chance: /t^l/ follows /bo/ with too high a probability; these syllables must form a word, "bottle" — and this is how this word is added to the child's vocabulary and can later be related to a specific object or concept. As early as six months of age, children have already extracted the words that recur with a high frequency in their environment, such as "baby", "daddy", "mommy", "bottle", "foot", "drink", "diaper" and so forth. These words become engraved in their memoryto such an extent that, as adults, they continue to hold a special status and are processed more effectively than other words of comparable meaning, sound, and frequency acquired later in life.
By the time they blow out their first candle, they have already laid down the foundation for the main rules of their native language at several levels, from elementary sounds (phonemes) to melody (prosody), vocabulary (lexicon), and grammar rules (syntax).
No other primate species is capable of such abilities. This very experiment has been attempted many times: several scientists tried adopting baby chimpanzees, treating them like family members, speaking to them in English or sign language or with visual symbols, only to know, a few years later, that none of these animals mastered a language.
The linguist Noam Chomsky, therefore, was probably right in postulating that our species is born with a "language acquisition device", a specialised system that is automatically triggered in the first years of life. As Darwin said in "The Descent of Man" (1871), language "certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt," but it is "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art." What is innate in us is the instinct to learn a language — an instinct so irrepressible that language appears spontaneously within a few generations in humans deprived of it.
12.What is the similarity between language acquisition and face perception?
1) Children have no difficulty with these processes at a young age.
2) These two processes require the same two senses: vision and hearing.
3) Knowledge of the native language and recognition of the faces of relatives are innate.
4) Children begin to speak and recognise their relatives at the same age.
13.Which of the following statements is TRUE?
1) Newborns cannot distinguish between native and foreign languages.
2) Babies in utero can't hear anything.
3) Babies in utero can only hear melodies, but not speech.
4) Babies begin to recognise their mother tongue while still in utero.
14.Why was it once thought that language acquisition began at the age of one or two?
1) Because people didn't know how language acquisition worked.
2) Because children can't speak until that age.
3) Because children's brains were thought to be underdeveloped by this age.
4) Because young children at this age do not have any talents yet.
15.From an early age, children…
1) understand what statistics is.
2) understand which words are used more often by people than others.
3) first learn a certain object or concept and then the name of that object or concept in their native language.
4) use statistical regularities in syllables to learn a language.
16. Which phrase is closest in meaning to the idiom "to engrave in one's memory" ("...become engraved in their memory…") in the 4th paragraph?
1) To forget about something quickly.
2) To impress deeply.
3) To make someone remember something.
4) To always remember something.
17. According to the article, what did researchers find out when they tried to raise a chimpanzee like a human baby?
1) Chimpanzees could only learn sign language.
2) It was impossible to think of a chimpanzee as a family member.
3) Chimpanzees could not learn the human language.
4) Chimpanzees are very intelligent animals that could learn a human language in the future.
18.Noam Chomsky's theory states that...
1) children are born knowing which language is their native one.
2) infants have special language-learning mechanisms in their brains.
3) children can learn any language (not just their parents' native language).
4) a language and a person are inseparable.