Why is the Native Language Learnt So Well? How does it happen that children learn their mother tongue so well? When we compa

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问题                  Why is the Native Language Learnt So Well?
    How does it happen that children learn their mother tongue so well? When we compare them with adults learning a foreign language, we often find this interesting fact. A little child without knowledge or experience often succeeds in a complete mastery of the language. A grown-up person with fully developed mental powers, in most case, may end up with a faulty and inexact command. What accounts for this difference?
    Despite other explanations, the real answer in my opinion lies partly in the child himself, partly in the behavior of the people around him. In the first place, the time of learning the mother tongue is the most favorable of all, namely, the first years of life. A child hears it spoken from morning till night and, what is more important, always in its genuine form, with the fight pronunciation, fight intonation, right use of words and fight structure. He drinks in all the words and expressions, which come to him in a flash, ever-bubbling spring. There is no resistance: there is perfect assimilation.
    Then the child has, as it were, private lessons all the year round, while an adult language-student has each week a limited number of hours, which he generally shares with others. The child has another advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations, always accompanied by the right kind of gestures and facial expressions. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often found in language lessons in schools, when one talks about ice and snow in June or scorching heat in January. And what a child hears is generally what immediately interests him. Again and again, when his attempts at speech are successful, his desires are understood and fulfilled.
    Finally, though a child’s "teachers" may not have been trained in language teaching, their relations with him are always close and personal. They take great pains to make their lessons easy.
Adults’ knowledge and mental powers hinder their complete mastery of a foreign language.

选项 A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned

答案C

解析 在第一段的第四句中发现mental powers,发现成年人对外语的掌握是不地道的和不准确的。而第二段的段首句引出成年人和儿童在学习语言方面不同的理由,但原文并没提到成年人掌握外语的能力较差的原因。
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