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  3. Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed langu

Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed langu

admin2013-06-17  34
问题     Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study 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 something that we are born with. or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people.
    When Bill Stoker went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stoker noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from their classroom teacher.
    Stoker had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English (混杂英语). But Stoker 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? It was in 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as "substandard". Stoker’s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).
    It is 37 years later. Stoker-now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture--is having lunch at a cafe near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation (调节) of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. "What I said," Stoker explains, "is that language is not mouth stuff-- it’s brain stuff."
According to the passage, the study of sign language is thought to be______.
选项 A、an approach to simplifying the grammatical structure of a language
B、an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of language
C、a challenge to traditional views on the nature of language
D、a new way to take at the learning of language
答案D
解析 原文第一段第三句与D项题内容相符。因此，D项是正确答案。
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