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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

admin2016-10-07  55
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 Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.
    Stokoe 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 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? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as "substandard". Stokoe’s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).
    It is 37 years later. Stokoe—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," Stokoe explains, "is that language is not mouth stuff-it’s brain stuff."
The study of sign language is thought to be _____.
选项 A、a new way to look at the learning of language
B、a challenge to traditional views on the nature of language
C、an approach to simplifying the grammatical structure of a language
D、an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of language
答案B
解析 从文章第3句“手语提供了一种新方法，用以探索大脑如何产生和理解语言，并为一个长期以来的科学争端——语言(连同语法)究竟是我们与生俱来的，还是一种我们后天学会的行为——提出了新的解释”可以看出，这是对语言的性质的传统观点的挑战，即B。A错在learning，文章并不是在讨论语言的学习，而是语言的产生和理解；C为简单原词干扰；D中的an attempt to clarify misunderstanding是对throw new light on an old scientific controversy的曲解，因为controversy不等于misunderstanding。另外，第1段最后一句中的rebel“反叛”一词也与B中的“挑战”一致。
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