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 ? 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 service 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 the 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 speed stages. are reached in a fixed sequence. and at a constantage, 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 twelvemonths he can speak simple words and understand simple commands. at eighteen month she 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 he knows his language differs from tbat of his parents in style. rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the eapacity of speaking. What is special about man&39;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 brains ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him. to analyze , to combine and recombine theparts of a language in new ways. But speech has to be induced-and this depends on interaction between the mother andthe. child. where the mother recognizes the signals in the child&39;s babbling. grasping and smiling,and responds to them. lnsensitivity of the mother to these signals dull the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the childs non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language. What is tbe purpose of the drastic experiment of Frederick in tbe thirteenth century? A.To discover what language a child would speak without bearing any human speech B.To prove that a baby couldn’t live witbout his mother C.To find out what role careful nursing would play in teaching a child to speak D.To prove that a child would be damaged without learning a langunge Aecording to the passnage the reason that children of the Frederick’s experment died is___.A.lack of language B.lack of good mothering C.without mothet tongue D.the nurses’enteless nursing Today some children are backward in speaking because___.A.they are incapable of learning langunge rapidly B.tbey are faced with so mouch language at once C.their mothers respond inadequstely to their attempts to speak D.their brain is not programmed to learn language rapidly