A questão refere-se ao texto abaixo.

A critical period for language learning

An eminent neurologist, Eric Lenneberg, argued that the human (1) .......... for language acquisition develops according to built-in biological schedules. Native language learning, he claimed, begins with the start of a state of “resonance” in the child which lasts from about two until the onset of puberty, at about age thirteen. The evidence for this so-called critical period for language acquisition offered by Lenneberg was clinical. Children aged two or three who (2) ………. brain damage may lose all or part of the language they have learned, but are able to begin the learning process again, often progressing at a faster (3) ………. than before. When children suffer aphasia between four and ten and begin learning language again, recovery is usually complete, even if (4) ………. several years. Aphasias suffered after puberty, on the other hand, are rarely recovered from completely, and among those (5) ………. after age eighteen, recovery is the exception rather than the rule, (6) ………. or total language loss usually being permanent. When Krashen (1983) reexamined the data on speech loss and recovery after unilateral brain damage, plus that available from psychological and dichotic listening tests, he found that the process of language lateralization, the shifting of most linguistic knowledge to the left hemisphere (in most righthanded people), is (7) ………. far earlier than puberty, (8) ………. by age five in most cases. (9) ………., the ability to transfer language function from the language-dominant hemisphere to the (10) ………. one when the former suffers damage also seems to disappear after five, although the idea that it may continue until puberty in some cases is a (11) ………., too, on the basis of the (12) ………. available.

(LENNEBERG, 1997, p. 129)