【TED】是一个会议的名称,它是英文technology,entertainment, design三个单词的首字母缩写。它是社会各界精英交流的盛会,这里有当代最杰出的思想家,这里有当代最优秀的科学家,这里有迸发着最闪耀的思想火花,这里孕育着最光辉的梦想。
Patricia Kuhl
Patricia Kuhl studies how we learn language as babies, looking at the ways our brains form around language acquisition.

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【全文听写】
Hints:
因结巴等问题造成的重复单词只写一遍
culture-bound
language-bound
head-turn
Tokyo
Seattle
"ra" and "la"
equivalent
What have we learned? Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as citizens of the world. They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using. And that's remarkable because you and I can't do that. We're culture-bound listeners. We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages. So the question arises: when do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are? And the answer: before their first birthdays. What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to "ra" and "la" -- sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. So at six to eight months the babies are totally equivalent. Two months later something incredible occurs. The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn.
我们从中了解到什么呢?全世界的婴儿就如我所述的是世界公民。他们能区分所有语言的所有声音,不管测试在哪一国,用哪种语言。令人惊讶的是你我却做不到这点。我们是受制于文化局限的听众。我们只能区分我们自己语言的声音,但分不清外语的那些声音。所以问题随之产生,这些小小世界公民在什么时候变成受制于文化局限的听众?答案是:一岁之前。这里看到的是扭转头测试的结果,日本东京和美国西雅图的婴儿接收了测试,让他们听ra和la的发音。这两个发音在英文里很重要,在日语里却没有。对于6到8个月的婴儿,他们的测试结果完全相似。2个月之后,便产生明显变化。在美国的婴儿掌握这些发音比较好,在日本的婴儿却差很多,但是这两组的婴儿均蓄势待发地要学习语言。