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.