
The BilingualBrain
When Karl Kim immigrated to the United States fromKorea’s a teenager, he had a hard time learning English. Now he speaks itfluently, and he had a unique opportunity to see how our brains adapt to a secondlanguage.1 As a graduate student, Kim worked in the lab of JoyHirsch, a neuroscientist in New York. ____1____ They found evidence thatchildren and adults don’t use the same parts of the brain when they learn asecond language.
The researchers used an instrument called an MRI2(magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to study the brains of two groups ofbilingual people. ____2____. The other consisted of people who, like Kim,learned their second language laterin life. People from both groups were placed inside the MRI scanner. Thisallowed Kim and Hirsch to see which parts of the brain were getting more bloodand were more active. They asked people from both groups to think about whatthey had done the day before, first in one language and then the other. Theycouldn’t speak out loud because any movement would disrupt the scanning.
Kim and Hirsch looked specifically at two languagecenters in the brain - Broca's area3, which is believed to controlspeech production, and Wernicke’s area3, which is thought to processmeaning. Kim and Hirsch found that both groups of people used the same part ofWernicke's area no matter what language they were speaking. ____3____
People who learned a second language as childrenused the same region in Broca’s area for both their first and second languages.People who learned a second language later in life used a different part ofBroca’s area for their second language. ____4____ Hirsch believes that whenlanguage is first being programmed in young children, their brains may mix thesounds and structures of all languages in the same area. Once that programmingis complete, the processing of a new language must be taken over by a differentpart of the brain.
A second possibility is simply that we may acquirelanguages differently as children than we do as adults. Hirsch thinks thatmothers teach a baby to speak by using different methods involving touch,sound, and sight. ____5____
词汇:
immigrate/ ˈɪmɪˌgreɪt / vt.使移居入境
scanner/ ˈskænə / n.扫描仪
bilingual/ baɪˈlɪŋgw(ə) l / adj.具备双语能力的
neuroscientist/'njʊərəʊ'saɪəntɪst / n.神经系统
科学家
unique/ ju:ˈni:k / adj.独特的
disrupt/ disˈrʌpt /使中断
2017年职称
英语(理工类)补全短文文章及译文8.doc
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