TEXT A Learning is an essential
process for living things to acquiring necessary skills and behaviours.
Scientists have already found that there is a critical period for learning in
man and animals. Once the right time for learning a skill or a certain behaviour
has passed, this skill or behaviour can never be properly learned.
Thorpe of Cambridge University found that the chaffinch has to learn most
of its songs, and that this learning has to occur during the early weeks of the
bird’s life and also during the first spring. If the bird is handreared and
isolated from other birds from the time of hatching, it sings only very simple
songs and it never learns the song of its species correctly.
That we speak our own language perfectly and the languages we learn later
imperfectly also depends on learning this skill at the right time. The brain
develops in such a way that it is ready to learn to speak between the ages of
about ten months and ten years. Languages learned later are not spoken
perfectly. The ability to speak a language is a mixed motor and sensory skill.
It is necessary to hear all the sounds, the subtle differences between similar
but not identical sounds, the rhythm and lilt of the language. One has also to
work tongue, throat, and lips, to control breathing. All this has to be managed
at one and the same time. From some time after birth until the age of six or
seven, normal children can learn all this perfectly, and without much difficulty
they can learn two or even three languages at the same time, without muddling
them up. But later, most of us cannot acquire this skill. We may learn to write
and read the new language perfectly; but to acquire the right inflexion and the
accent and the ability to speak so that no one can detect that the language is
not our mother-tongue hardly ever occurs. But those of us who
still want to learn foreign languages after these early milestones have been
passed need not worry; for though we may not learn to speak a new language like
the natives, we know from thousands of examples that we can go on learning
languages beyond the age of eighty. There are so many activities adding to the
simple word "learning" that although some of the processes become less efficient
with ageing of the brain, our actual experience of learning helps us in learning
new material. According to the last sentence, we can make all the following statements EXCEPT that ______.
A．the process of learning is complicated B．the older a learner is, the less efficient his learning is C．ageing of the brain influences learning D．learners can benefit from their learning experience