跟读练习: CONTEMPORARY TOPICS UNIT 9 LINGUISTICS ANIMAL COMMUNICATION - 通过视频学习英语口语

How many of you have pets?

They're great, aren't they?

I've got a golden retriever myself, and often I feel that my dog is communicating with me.

But do animals really communicate like we do?

Well, Harvard professor Mark Hauser has identified several types of animal communication.

And like humans, they do use sounds and nonverbal behavior to communicate.

For instance, they convey information to one another, they establish and maintain social organization, and they express their perceptions of the world.

So today we'll look at animal communication through the lens of human language.

Specifically, we'll use four basic characteristics of human language to see how animal and human communication styles compare.

I think that you'll be surprised at how sophisticated animal communication is.

But ultimately, we'll see that human communication is far more flexible and better developed.

Now the first characteristic we'll look at is arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness means that there's no logical relationship between a sound and its meaning.

For example, the word sky has no relationship with the thing it refers to, right?

In comparison, a lot of animal communication is not arbitrary.

For example, the growl of an angry dog is meant to very directly warn and threaten.

There's nothing arbitrary about this message, right?

However some animal communication is arbitrary, albeit to a limited degree.

For example, meerkats, a small African animal, can make about 20 distinct sounds.

They use one alarm call for snakes, another for eagles, and yet another for large cats, just to name a few, okay?

This is impressive, but human languages are far more flexible because they have a wide range of sounds.

English, for example, has more than 40 distinct sounds, such as ah, kuh, or t.

And we can make an unlimited number of arbitrary words by altering these sounds, far more than any animal.

The second characteristic of human language we'll compare is displacement.

Displacement is communicating ideas about things that are not physically present.

For example, if you talk about what you did last weekend, that's displacement.

Now, can animals do this?

Well, often the answer is they can't.

For instance, if your dog doesn't like the neighbor cat, maybe it barks when it sees the cat.

But when the cat isn't around, the dog doesn't bark.

It doesn't communicate its dislike of the cat.

This shows that the dog doesn't have the capacity for displacement.

Well, one exception to this is bees.

Many types of bees use displacement in their dances.

Through these dances, they're able to communicate to other bees the distance, direction, quality, and quantity of a food source.

The meaning of the dance is so clear and so precise

that even scientists researching bee dances can interpret exactly where the food is.

In any case, although I think that the bees is an excellent example of the sophistication of animal communication,

in general, animals' use of displacement is extremely limited compared to humans.

Think about books, magazines, and the internet.

I mean, everything that we read involves displacement, as do most of our conversations.

The third characteristic of human language that I want to consider is called cultural transmission, the idea that language is passed from one generation to the next.

Now, obviously, humans excel at this, but what about animals?

Well, some animals are also fairly skilled at passing language on to their young.

A good example of this is the killer whale.

They live in groups, and different groups develop different accents, just like people.

The accents are passed from older to younger killer whales.

Well, this is yet another example of the sophistication of some animal communication.

However, once again, what we see is that while animal and human communication share similarities,

similarities, the characteristics that we are looking for are far more developed in humans.

For example, in addition to accents, humans also pass on extremely large vocabularies and complex grammar.

The fourth and last characteristic that we'll talk about today is called discreteness.

This means that language is made up of discrete units that can be combined in different ways to create different meanings.

As humans, we do this by using sounds to make words and using grammar to arrange those words into sentences.

The best example we have of animals using discreteness is from chimpanzees raised in captivity.

Using a keyboard, chimps have made requests for food by typing, raisin peanut, which seemed to mean raisins and peanuts.

Chimps have also invented phrases that describe things.

For example, one chimp called watermelon drink fruit.

Clever, huh?

But while this is fairly impressive, one major problem with the chimpanzees' use of language is that their word order is quite random.

So most linguists would say that the chimpanzees really do not understand and use grammar in the way that humans do, and therefore can't be said to use discreteness.

In the use of discreteness, we see that humans have a huge advantage over animals.

allows us to make complex words and sentences that communicate an unlimited number of meanings.

And this is one of the really impressive, actually amazing aspects of human communication.

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

跟读练习: CONTEMPORARY TOPICS UNIT 9 LINGUISTICS ANIMAL COMMUNICATION - 通过视频学习英语口语

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什么是跟读法？