【Dream digger】評論

Human language is made possible by an impressive    16   (B) aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds.    Both birdsong and language are passed culturally to later generations through vocal learning. Geographically distant populations of the same bird species can make small tweaks to their songs over time, eventually   17  (C) resulting  in a new dialect - a process similar    18   (C) in  some ways to how humans develop different accents, dialects and languages. With all these similarities in mind, it's reasonable to ask if birds themselves have language. It may(D) come down to how we define it.    "I wouldn't say they have language in the way linguistic experts define it," says neuroscientist Erich Jarvis of the Rockefeller University in New York City, and a coauthor of Hyland Bruno's paper on birdsong and language. But for scientists like Jarvis who study the neurobiology of vocal communication in birds, "I would say they have a (A) remnant or a rudimentary form of what we might call spoken language.令人印象深刻的16    (B)聲樂學習能力使人類語言成為可能 。嬰兒聽到聲音和文字，形成對它們的記憶，然後嘗試產生這些聲音，隨著他們的成長而提高。大多數動物根本無法學會模仿聲音。但在生活灌木叢中散落的非人類發聲學習者中，最令人印象深刻的是鳥類。    鳥鳴和語言都通過聲樂學習在文化上傳遞給後代。隨著時間的推移，地理上相距遙遠的同種鳥類種群可以對它們的歌曲進行細微調整，最終  17   (C) 產生  一種新的方言 - 一個類似於   18    (C) 的過程     人類如何發展不同口音、方言和語言的一些方法。考慮到所有這些相似之處，詢問鳥類本身是否有語言是合理的。它可能（D）歸結為我們如何定義它。    “我不會說他們擁有語言專家定義的語言，”紐約市洛克菲勒大學的神經科學家埃里希賈維斯說，他是海蘭布魯諾關於鳥鳴和語言的論文的合著者。但是對於像賈維斯這樣研究鳥類聲音交流的神經生物學的科學家來說，“我會說他們有（A）殘餘或我們可能稱之為口語的基本形式。

【Kelly Yu】評論

(A) remnant  殘餘，剩餘；遺跡(B) susurrus   低語聲(C) comity    禮讓(D) nonage   未成年