TED專家告訴你：何時是第二語言啟蒙的最佳時期？

01-23

GT親子啟蒙英語

你好，我是sweet媽媽，

一個和你一樣非常普通的媽媽

親子啟蒙英語的實踐者+兒童心理諮詢師

陪伴你的孩子一起成長，你就是孩子最好的雙語學校

很多媽媽會疑問，我的寶寶何時開始學除母語之外的第二語言，如何同時學幾種語言？學習第二語言的最佳時期是什麼？同時學幾種語言對母語有沒有影響呢？

帶著這些疑問，我們來看看Patricia Kuhl在Ted英語演講：孩子的語言天賦，看完這個視頻，相信上面的疑問基本都能解決了。

ted英語演講：The linguistic genius of babies嬰兒的語言天賦

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.But today I"m going to talk to you about something you can"t see

我想讓大家看看這個嬰兒。吸引大家關注的是她的眼睛以及讓人忍不住摸摸的皮膚。但今天我要講些你看不到的東西。

And there in 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.

在這裡有個關鍵的問題，為什麼對你和我或者成年人，不能保留一種新言？這和你的大腦有關，這兒我們看到有個學習語言的關鍵期。讀懂這幅圖的方法是看你在橫軸上的年齡。

(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

（笑聲）你再看對應的縱軸上可以看出，對於獲取第二外語的能力，嬰兒和孩子是語言天才，直到7歲語言系統慢慢地呈下降趨勢。青春期後，如圖我們語言能力衰退。科學家們確信這曲線圖的情況，但是全世界的實驗室都試圖查明這到底是什麼原因？.

So we"ve been studying the babies using a technique that we"re using all over the world and the sounds of all languages. The baby sits on a parent"s lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes -- like from "ah" to "ee." If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum. A six-monther adores the task.

我們一直致力於研究嬰兒語言使用技巧，也是全世界語言的使用技巧。嬰兒坐在父母的膝上，我們訓練當聽到一個聲音從「ah」到「ee」變化時就轉頭，如果嬰兒們一聽到就轉頭，黑盒子就會亮，會出現一隻敲鼓的熊貓。六個月大的嬰兒喜歡這個測試。

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.

答案是：一歲之前，這裡所看到的是針對日本東京和美國西雅圖的嬰兒扭轉頭測試結果，讓他們聽ra和la的兩個發音的時候（這兩個發音在英文里很重要,在日語里卻有)，對於6個月—8個月的嬰兒，他們的測試結果完全相似，2個月之後便產生明顯變化,美國的嬰兒掌握這些發音比較好,在日本的嬰兒卻差很多,然而這兩組的嬰兒都在學習語言的時期。

Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they"re doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear. And those distributions grow. And what we"ve learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. English has a lot of Rs and Ls. The distribution shows. And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese "R." So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are. But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We"re governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development.

帕特里夏·庫爾：在語言生成的期間，當嬰兒聆聽時同時也在統計他們聽到的語言。區分這些聲音的能力在變強。我們研究了解到的結果是嬰兒對統計很敏感，日語和英語的聲音統計是非常非常不同的。英語有很多Rs和Ls音,如分布圖所示,日語的分布圖則是完全不同的我們在這兒看到一組中間音---它們是日語的R音。嬰兒吸收語言的統計數據，這改變了他們的大腦；這就是把他們從世界公民變成像我們一樣受文化局限的聽眾的原因。但我們受我們早期形成的記憶性語言的影響。也不再能吸收這些統計。

sweet媽媽總結語錄：

在6-8個月之前的嬰兒，對於任何國家語言敏感度一致，但是在這之後的2個月，由於語言環境的不同，刺激少的語種的敏感度就會下降。由此得出，8個月是語言第一關鍵期的重要分水嶺。

So we asked ourselves, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language? And we tested this by exposing American babies who"d never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period. We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. Six to eight months, they"re totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible happens. But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies. What we did was expose American babies during this period to Mandarin. It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions. Here"s what it looked like in the laboratory.

那麼我們自問，嬰兒能不能統計一種全新的語言？我們測試了這個，給一個美國嬰兒聽他們從沒有聽過的第二種語言，這是在他們在關鍵時期第一次聽到普通話，我們得知，當我們讓台北和西雅圖的單語者接觸普通話的聲音，在6月--8個月的期間，他們辨音能力幾乎相同。2個月之後，一些不可思議的事情發生了。但這次台灣嬰兒表現好，而不是美國的嬰兒。我們所做的是在這關鍵期讓美國的嬰兒多接觸普通話。這就如講普通話的親戚來拜訪了你家一個月，和嬰兒上了12節普通話課。在實驗室看來就這樣。

(Video) Mandarin Speaker: [Mandarin]

（視頻）普通話說者：[普通話]

PK: But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who"d been listening for 10-and-a-half months. What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language. Whatever you put in front of them, they"ll take statistics on.

但看看上過12次普通話課的嬰兒的身上都發生了什麼。他們和那些曾聽普通話有10個半月大的台灣嬰兒一樣棒。這說明了嬰兒對一種新語言也能做統計，不管你在他們面前說了什麼，他們就會統計這語言。

sweet媽媽總結語錄

按照上一段的實驗結果，在6-8個月之後，如果不再進行非母語語言的刺激，非母語部分的語言敏感度會在之後的2個月內出現下降的趨勢，但是在8個月之後持續對嬰兒輸入第二語言，其結果和第二語言為母語的寶寶的吸收程度一樣。所以持續不斷地多國語言刺激就是最有效的學習第二語言的根本

But we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise. So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage, the same 12 sessions, but over a television set and another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen. What did we do to their brains? What you see here is the audio result -- no learning whatsoever -- and the video result -- no learning whatsoever. It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics. The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics.

我們也好奇在這一學習過程中人起了什麼樣的作用。所以我們設置了另一組嬰兒讓他們如法炮製地上12節課，但是在電視機前上課和另一組嬰兒只是通過音頻上課看電視屏幕上的玩具熊。我們又對他們的腦袋瓜做什麼了？我們這兒看到的是音頻結果沒有任何學習效果，視頻結果也是沒有任何學習效果。只有人才能幫助嬰兒統計他們的聲音數據，當嬰兒在統計時，社會大腦控制著。

sweet媽媽總結語錄

只有人對孩子語言的學習起著作用，而不是電視或者音樂，所以想要你的寶寶學好第二語言，那就陪伴他/她一起開口說把！

看完所有的視頻，是否你能理解了呢？孩子小小的腦袋裡裝滿了神奇，他們不僅僅是天生的科學家，也是天生的語言家，他們小小的腦袋裡能同時容納能多國語言，只要你持續的對話和互動，他們會給你意想不到的驚喜。

視頻主人公簡介：

你好，我是sweet媽媽

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