The Linguistic Genius of Babies (Listening)

1) What is the lecture mainly about?

A) The unique ability of babies to absorb information quickly and easily.
B) The way that a mother and her child can connect through language.
C) The accomplishments of a selection of talented children.
D) The way an infant's brain organizes linguistic information.


2) Listen to the beginning of the lecture again. At 00:31, she says, "The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science." What does that mean?

A) She is expressing wonder at the power of a baby's brain.
B) She is speculating about the future of the child's career.
C) She is comparing the complexity of neuroscience to rocket science.
D) She is explaining that modern techniques can reveal how the mind works.


3) According to the lecture, the "critical period" is

A) not a theory that is accepted by all researchers.
B) the most important span of time in a human's life for language learning.
C) the time during which language learning begins to decline.
D) a cycle of highs and lows for language learners.


4) How do the statistics of a language affect a baby's development?

A) The baby learns to distinguish /l/ and /r/ sounds by listening to their parents.
B) The baby becomes more sensitive to the common sounds of their parents' language.
C) The baby calculates the number of occurrences of specific sounds and uses those figures to analyze the language it hears.
D) The baby distinguishes its language from other languages by the end of it's first year.


5) Which of the following statements are true about infant language acquisition? (choose two options)

A) Social elements of the brain are crucial to language learning.
B) Baby's have significant difficulties when you change their language environment suddenly.
C) The sounds in some languages such as Mandarin are more difficult for children to distinguish than those of other languages.
D) The television language lessons were mostly ineffectual for the babies in the speaker's experiments.