Speech—the act of uttering sounds to convey meaning—is a kind of human action. Like any other constantly repeated action, speaking has to be learned, but once it is learned, it becomes a generally unconscious and apparently automatic process. As far as we can determine, human beings do not need to be forced to speak; most babies seem to possess a sort of instinctive drive to produce speech like noises. How to speak and what to say are another matter altogetner. There actions are learned from the particular society into which the baby is born; so that, like all conduct that is learned from a society—from the people around us—speech is a patterned activity. The meandering(漫目无地的)babble(咿呀学语)and chatter of a young child are eventually channeled by imitation into a few orderly grooves that represent the pattern accepted as meaningful by the people around him. Similarly, a child’s indiscriminate(不加分辨的)practice of putting things into his mouth becomes limited to putting food into his mouth in a certain way. The sounds that a child can make are more varied and numerous than the sounds that any particular language uses. However, a child born into a society with a pattem of language is encouraged to make a small selection of sounds and to make these few sounds over and over until it is natural for him to make these sounds and not others. 小题1:For an adult, the process of speaking usually involves .
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