外刊阅读 | 今日心理学 | 婴儿的脑子里在想什么？

Apple breeders continue to test new varieties for five to 15 years after the initial taste test to screen for disease resistance, heat resilience, winter hardiness, the ability to bear every year (some bear only every other year) and other traits. 

screen   v.审查；筛选

bear    v.结（果实）

苹果育种者在初次品尝测试后，会继续对新品种进行五到十五年的测试，以筛选出具有抗病性、耐热性、耐寒性、每年结果（有些品种仅隔年结果）以及其他特性的品种。

What Goes On in the Minds of Babies?

婴儿的脑子里在想什么？

1

For most of us, it's hard to picture life without language; our inner worlds are full of these completely virtual things that seem as real as physical objects.Almost all people learn their first language as children and don’t remember themselves before that point; childhood amnesia subsides around age 4, by which point children usually speak pretty well. Rare accounts of those who learned their first language in adulthood imply a sharp line separating their life into two completely different parts.

What exactly infants can understand before they start speaking, though, remains a matter of debate. Just how far can human thought go without words?The question is important not only because we want to know more about our children (although that, too), but because the relationship between language and the mind is one of the most pressing questions of our time, as it is at the center of the debate about artificial intelligence and whether or not it could ever become conscious or malicious.

There are, of course, lots of things that prelingual infants can’t do. For instance, until 18 months, most can’t recognize themselves in a mirror. Another classic example is the so-called A-not-B task. An experimenter repeatedly hides a toy in location A within the infant’s reach, and the infant successfully retrieves it. Then, the experimenter moves the toy to location B while the infant watches. Most infants under a year old, however, continue to look for the toy in location A, unable to process the thought that the location has changed.But sometimes an infant can surprise you. For example, many languages have this odd association between round shapes and “round” sounds. Words that describe smooth, round things also tend to sound kind of round: ball, round, amoeboid; whereas words that describe pointy things often sound sharp and jagged: spike, knife, pincers.

This example shows how studies on prelingual infants can tell us which parts of our cognition are derived from culture, and which ones from biology.I think this study would please Noam Chomsky, whose central thesis has always been that what we call “language” is an externalization of innate cognition. According to this view, words—what we learn from culture—populate a pre-existing scaffold of thought, which does not depend on culture, but instead on genes and evolution.

Language, Chomsky has always said, is not for communication; it is for thinking. I always have a hard time getting this point across to my students. The new study is a good way to address this question. You could say there’s “communication language"—grammar plus words, which we use to exchange thoughts with others—and “Chomskyan language,” the broader, abstract grammar of cognition that we use internally. Infants don’t yet have communication language, but, as this study shows, they have Chomskyan language.

Journal：psychologytoday

Title：What Goes On in the Minds of Babies?(October 24, 2024)

Category：Child Development

Figuring out /where exactly the lines are drawn between these two forms of language/ is a key task for neuroscience. 

句子主干是：Figuring out（主语）+ is（系动词）+ a key task（表语）。where exactly the lines are drawn between these two forms of language 是宾语从句，作为Figuring out的宾语。

翻译：弄清楚这两种语言之间的确切界限是神经科学的一项关键任务。

The road to success is seldom smooth.

翻译练习，欢迎大家文末留言打卡，下期推送文章公布答案哟，一起阅外刊学英语吧！

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