[ 30 ]

Now, you are going to be working on / writing a series of music lessons / for very young children.

现在，你将为年幼的孩子们编写一系列音乐课程

As before, you'll be basing / the degin of your lessons / on the existing research / into how children of the specific age group -- infants lessthan a year old -- perceive music.

和以前一样，你的课程将以现有的研究为基础，研究特定年龄段的儿童，不到一岁的婴儿如何感知音乐

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now you may be wondering how we can gain any insight into how infants perceive music when they can't talk yet,

现在你可能想知道，当婴儿还不会说话时，我们如何才能深入了解他们是如何感知音乐的

it's true they can't actually tell us anything with words, but we do have methods of evaluating their sensory perceptions.

的确，他们实际上无法用语言告诉我们任何事情，但我们确实有评估他们感官感知的方法

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[ 32 ]

in the context of research into early childhood development.

在幼儿发展研究的背景下

that means measuring how much attention they pay to stimuli.

这意味着测量他们对刺激的关注程度

how quickly do they turn their heads toward one sound as opposed to a different sound, how much time do they spend listening to each sound before they look away.

他们多快地将头转向一种声音而不是另一种声音，他们在移开视线之前花多长时间聆听每种声音

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[ 33 ]

Here's an example, one of my colleagues / did a study of infants / in which she played them a recoding of a child / singing a song.

举个例子，我的一位同事对婴儿做了一项研究，她给他们播放了一个孩子唱歌的录音

The reason she used a child singer is because infants are known to have a preference for high pitched voices.

她之所以选择儿童歌手，是因为众所周知，婴儿更喜欢高音

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[ 34 ]

all the infants listened longer to the unaccompanied version -- the voice only, without any instruments.

所有的婴儿都听了更长时间的无伴奏版本——只有声音，没有任何乐器。

that was their universal preference.

这是他们的普遍偏好

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[ 35 ]

but despite their having this innate auditory perception, infant seemed to be able to process only a limited amount of information at any one time,

但尽管他们有这种天生的听觉感知，婴儿似乎在任何时候都只能处理有限的信息量，

because their brains are at such an early stage of development.

因为他们的大脑正处于发育的早期阶段

Having to attend to two sounds simultaneously, the voice and the instrument, is probably more than they can handle.

必须同时注意两种声音，声音和乐器，这可能超出了他们的能力

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[ 36 ]

it's likely that they can't focus on differences in the sounds and the similarity of the melodies at the same time.

很可能他们不能同时关注不同的声音旋律相似的

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[ 37 ]

but once their brains mature a little bit, about when they reach first birthday.

但一旦他们的大脑稍微成熟一点，大约在他们一岁生日的时候

they develop the ability to recognize that the melodies are identical.

他们培养了识别旋律相同的能力

even though the instruments playing them sound so different.

尽管演奏它们的乐器听起来如此不同

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[ 38 ]

but this is not something you need to know for the assignment, but i just want to mention it's fascinating the way humans adapt to the music they're exposed to.

但这不是你在任务中需要知道的，但我只是提到，人类适应他们所接触的音乐的方式很有趣

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[ 39 ]

that is infants also all start out with similar perceptual abilities and then they gradually acquire knowledge about the specific kinds of sounds that are popular in the music of the society they live in.

也就是说，婴儿一开始也都有相似的感知能力，然后他们逐渐了解他们所生活的社会中流行的特定种类的声音