Critical Reasoning

Children develop the ability to form the sounds necessary for speech between the ages of two and five. A team of linguists studied groups of children between two and five years of age in several regions of Australia and found that children pronounced certain phonemes differently in different regions. For example, children from a rural town in the South consistently pronounced the phonemes differently from their counterparts in Sydney. The linguists concluded that pronunciation of these phonemes is learned from contact with adults and other children and not inherited genetically.

Which of the following, if true, would lend the most support to the linguists' conclusion?

A. There are more similarities than differences found in the pronunciation patterns of any two groups of Australian children involved in the study.
B. Compared to the younger children in the study, the older children who had begun preschool were consistently better able to pronounce the phonemes.
C. Children from one of the regions studied had more difficulty pronouncing certain phonemes than did the children from every other region.
D. Australian children under the age of six have little contact with adults or children outside their region.
E. It has been proven that young children acquire social behavior patterns from contact with others and not through genetics.

Looking at this question, I don't see any answer choice that does much to support the linguists' conclusion.

A indicates nothing about what underlies the differences.

B may be the best in that it may indicate that once the children go to school they pick up from people with whom they are involved at school how to pronounce the phonemes.

At the same time, this answer does not convincingly support the linguists' conclusion as the children's pronunciation improvements may be related to age rather than to their experiences at school.

C does indicate anything about the source of this difference in difficulty.

D does not really support the linguists' conclusion, as it does not demonstrate that the children learn pronunciation from those around them.

E is a little weird. Is pronunciation a social behavior? If so E would support the linguists' conclusion. If pronunciation is not a social behavior then E is mostly irrelevant, at least in GMAT land.

So B seems to be the best, though it is not clearly supportive of the conclusion.