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  3. Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have linguists realized that signed languages are unique -- a

Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have linguists realized that signed languages are unique -- a

admin2010-03-25  53
问题    Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have linguists realized that signed languages are unique -- a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: whether language, complete with grammar, is innate in our species, or whether it is a learned behaviour. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one renegade teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people.
   When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English  ....  American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English. But Stokoe believed the "hand talk" his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth?
   When Stokoe analyzed his students’ signing, he found it was like spoken languages, which combine bits of sound -- each meaningless by itself -- into meaningful words. Signers, following similar rules, combine individually meaningless hand and body movements into words. They choose from a palette of hand shapes... They also choose where to make a sign... (and) how to orient the hand and arm... A common underlying structure of both spoken and signed languages is thus at the level of the smallest units that are linked to form words.
The title of the passage suggests that American Sign Language
选项 A、imitates spoken English.
B、cannot be spoken.
C、requires special intelligence.
D、is cognitively complex.
答案D
解析 从文中对该语言的分析，我们知道实际的表达十分复杂，最后一段就是介绍其复杂性。
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