Before the 1500’s, the western plains of North America were dominated by farmers. One group, the Mandans, (31) in the upper Missouri River country, primarily in present-day North Dakota. They had large villages of houses (32) close together.
The (33) arrangement enabled the Mandans to protect themselves more easily (34) the attacks of others who might seek to (35) some of the food these highly capable farmers stored from one year to the next.
The women had primary responsibility for the fields. They had to exercise (36) skill to produce the desired results, (37) their northern location meant fleeting growing seasons. Winter often lingered; autumn could (38) by severe frost. For good measure, during the spring and summer, drought, heat, hail, grasshoppers, and other (39) might await the wary grower.
Under (40) conditions, Mandan women had to grow maize capable of weathering (41) They began (42) it appeared feasible to do so in the spring.
Harvesting proceeded in (43) stages. In August the Mandans picked a small amount of the crop (44) it had matured fully. This green corn was boiled, dried, and shelled, with some of the maize (45) for immediate consumption and the reststored in (46) bags. Later in the fall, the people picked the rest of the corn. They saved the best of the harvest for seeds or for trade, (47) the remainder eaten right away or stored for later use in underground reserves. With appropriate (48) of the extra food, the Mandans protected themselves (49) the disaster of crop failure and accompanying (50) .

All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1, 000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.