【TED】是一個會議的名稱，它是英文technology,entertainment, design三個單詞的首字母縮寫。它是社會各界精英交流的盛會，這里有當(dāng)代最杰出的思想家，這里有當(dāng)代最優(yōu)秀的科學(xué)家，這里有迸發(fā)著最閃耀的思想火花，這里孕育著最光輝的夢想。
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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因結(jié)巴等問題造成的重復(fù)單詞只寫一遍
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.
我們從中了解到什么呢？全世界的嬰兒就如我所述的是世界公民。他們能區(qū)分所有語言的所有聲音，不管測試在哪一國，用哪種語言。令人驚訝的是你我卻做不到這點。我們是受制于文化局限的聽眾。我們只能區(qū)分我們自己語言的聲音，但分不清外語的那些聲音。所以問題隨之產(chǎn)生，這些小小世界公民在什么時候變成受制于文化局限的聽眾？答案是：一歲之前。這里看到的是扭轉(zhuǎn)頭測試的結(jié)果，日本東京和美國西雅圖的嬰兒接收了測試，讓他們聽ra和la的發(fā)音。這兩個發(fā)音在英文里很重要，在日語里卻沒有。對于6到8個月的嬰兒，他們的測試結(jié)果完全相似。2個月之后，便產(chǎn)生明顯變化。在美國的嬰兒掌握這些發(fā)音比較好，在日本的嬰兒卻差很多，但是這兩組的嬰兒均蓄勢待發(fā)地要學(xué)習(xí)語言。