题型：阅读理解 题类：模拟题 难易度：普通
广东省惠州市惠东中学2018届高三下学期英语5月热身综合练习试卷
Long before they can actually speak, babies pay special attention to the speech they hear around them. Within the first month of their lives, babies' responses to the sound of the human voice will be different from their responses to other sorts of hearing stimulation. They will stop crying when they hear a person talking, but not if they hear a bell or the sound of a rattle. At first, the sounds that a baby notices might be only those words that receive the heaviest emphasis and that often occur at the ends of utterances(讲话，说话). By the time they are six or seven weeks old, babies can detect the difference between syllables pronounced with rising and falling tones. Very soon, these differences in adult stress and intonation can influence babies' emotional states and behavior. Long before they develop actual language comprehension, babies can sense when an adult is happy or angry, attempting to begin or end new behavior, and so on, merely on the basis of clues such as the rate, volume, and melody of adult speech.
Adults make it as easy as they can for babies to pick up a language by exaggerating(夸张) such clues. One researcher observed babies and their mothers in six diverse cultures and found that, in all six languages, the mothers used simplified utterances and nonsense sounds, and transformed certain sounds into baby talk. Other researchers have noted that when mothers talk to babies who are only a few months old, they exaggerate the pitch, loudness, and intensity of their words. They also exaggerate their facial expressions, hold vowels(元音) longer, and emphasize certain words.
More significant for language development than their response to general intonation is observation that tiny babies can make relatively fine distinctions between speech sounds. In other words, babies enter the world with the ability to make those precisely perceptual（知觉的，感性的） recognition that are necessary if they are to acquire listening language.
Babies obviously obtain pleasure from sound input, too: even as young as nine months they will listen to songs or stories, although the words themselves are beyond their understanding. For babies, language is a sensory-motor delight rather than the route to boring meaning that it often is for adults.
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