TED演讲：单词的诞生(4)

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　　Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, 在24个月里，在最初的2年里，这才是我真正关注的

　　this is a map of every word he learned in chronological¹ order. 这里有一张图按照时序列出了他所学到的词汇

　　And because we have full transcripts², 因为我们有全部的记录

　　we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. 我们为他到两岁前学会的503个单词都做了辨认和分析

　　He was an early talker. And so we started to analyze³ why. 他算是说话早的。所以我们开始分析其原因

　　Why were certain words born before others? 为什么有些词他学得早

　　This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. 这是其中的一个研究结果，是一年多前出来的，让我们很吃惊

　　The way to interpret this apparently⁴ simple graph 解读这张看似简单的图表的方式

　　is, on the vertical⁵ is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances⁶ are based on the length of utterances. 是横坐标表示，照顾者的话语复杂程度基于话语的长度

　　And the axis⁷ is time. And all of the data, we aligned⁸ based on the following idea: 纵坐标代表了时间。所有的数据我们都用下述的方法排列：

　　Every time my son would learn a word, 每次我们发现儿子学了一个新的词

　　we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. 我们就会回溯他听过的这个词的所有的语言记录

　　And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. 然后我们绘制这些语言的长度

　　And what we found was this curious phenomena⁹, that caregiver speech would systematically¹⁰ dip to a minimum, 我们发现了一个奇特的现象，照顾者的讲话会系统地将语言简化

　　making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend¹¹ back up in complexity¹². 简化到最简单的程度，然后渐渐地回升到更复杂的句子

　　And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely¹³ with when each word was born -- word after word, systematically. 而惊奇的事是这种回升和下降，正好精确的吻合了每个词的诞生过程--一个词接一个词，很有系统规律

　　So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself, my wife and our nanny -- 似乎三个主要的照顾他的人--我，我妻子，和我们的保姆--

　　were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously¹⁴ restructuring our language 都是有系统的，我想，也是下意识的重新构建我们的用语

　　to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. 去迎合他的新的词汇的诞生，带他渐渐学习更为复杂的语言。

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