TED名人演讲稿：孩子的语言天赋

【趣味雅思】TED名人演讲稿：孩子的语言天赋

点课台前言：雅思听力对于很多烤鸭来说都是一道难关，大家都在苦苦思索，怎样的雅思听力。今天，点课台老师给大家整理了TED演讲，附演讲稿与视频，希望可以帮助到正在备考的考生。TED是美国的一家私有非盈利机构，该机构以它组织的TED大会著称，这个会议的宗旨是“用思想的力量来改变世界”。大家在锻炼雅思听力的时候，也可以学习一下里面的主角们的思维模式，论述方法，希望还能对大家的雅思写作有所启迪。

I want you to take a look at this baby. What you’re drawn to are her eyes and

the skin you love to touch.

我想让大家看看这个婴儿。吸引大家关注的是她的眼睛以及让人忍不住摸摸的皮肤。

But today I’m going to talk to you about something you can’t see -- what’s

going on up in that little brain of hers. The modern tools of neuroscience are

demonstrating to us that what’s going on up there is nothing short of rocket

science. And what we’re learning is going to shed some light on what the

romantic writers and poets described as the “celestial openness” of the child’s

mind.

但今天我要讲些你看不到的东西，在她的小脑袋瓜里的东西。当代神经科学的研究工具展示出我们对婴儿脑袋里的东西知之甚少。我们要知道的

是让浪漫作家和诗人产生灵感并称之为孩子心智的“非凡的通慧”

What we see here is a mother in India, and she’s speaking Koro, which is a

newly discovered language. And she’s talking to her baby. What this mother --

and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world -- understands [is] that, to

preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies.

大家这儿看到的是印度的一位母亲，她讲克罗语，这是一种新发现的语言。她对她的孩子说这种语言。这位母亲和世界上说克罗语的800人

明白要保留这种语言，他们必须对婴儿说这种语言。

And therein lies a critical puzzle. Why is it that you can’t preserve a

language by speaking to you and I, to the adults? Well, it’s got to do with your

brain. What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning. The

way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis.

在这里有个关键的问题。为什么要是对你和我，成年人说一种新语言却不能保留它? 这是和你的大脑有关。这儿我们看到有个学习语言的关键期。

读懂这幅图的方法是看你在横轴上的年龄。

(Laughter) And you’ll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second

language. Babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then

there’s a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map. No scientists

dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out

why it works this way

(笑声) 你再对应看纵轴上你悉得第二外语的能力。婴儿和孩子是语言天才直到7岁然后语言系统会呈下降趋势。青春期后，如图我们语言能力衰退。

科学家们确信这曲线图的情况，但是全世界的实验室都试图查明这到底是怎么回事.

Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development -- and

that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their

language. We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we’ll have a model

for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in

childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development.

在我实验室的工作主要是研究第一个关键期这个时期是关于婴儿试着掌握他们语言