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

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

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问题     Sign bas 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 bas 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 "band 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(调解) 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."
选项 A、a new way to look at the lemming of language
B、a challenge to traditional views on the nature of language
C、an approach to simplify the grammatical structure of a language
D、an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of language
答案B
解析 细节推理题。从文章第一段第三句"They offer a new way…and throw new light on an old scientific controversy：whether language…is something that we are born with，or whether it is a learned behavior"．手势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：语言究竟是我们与生俱来的，还是一种我们后天学会的行为。由此可以看出，这是对传统语言的性质观点的挑战，而B项内容是原文内容的改写，由此可知答案为B。
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