新托福考试必备：新托福TPO（1-24）听力原文文本TPO10

　　Professor
　　OK. If I ask about the earliest thing you can remember, I will bet for most of you,
　　your earliest memory would be about from age of 3, right? Well, that’s true for
　　most adults. We cannot remember anything that happened before age of 3.
　　And this phenomenon is so widespread and well-documented it has a name. It
　　is called child amnesia and it was first documented in 1893.
　　As I said, this phenomenon refers to the adults not being able to remember the
　　childhood incidents. It’s not children trying to remember events from last month
　　or last years. Of course you follow that if you can’t remember incidents as your
　　child, you probably won’t remember as an adult. OK, so … why is this? What is
　　the reason from the child amnesia? Well, once a popular explanation was that
　　child memories are always repressed and memories are disturbing so that is
　　adults we keep them in barricade. And so we can recall them and this is base
　　on…well it’s not base on, on, on… the kind of self-research in the lab testing
　　we want to talk about today. So let’s put that explanation aside and
　　concentrate on just two. OK? It could be that as children we do form memories
　　of things prior to age of 3, but forget as we get grew older, let’s one explanation.
　　Another possibility is that children younger than 3 lack some cognitive capacity
　　for memory. And that idea, that children are unable to form memories that have
　　been the dominant belief psychology for the past 100 years. And this idea is
　　very much tied to things, the theory of Jean Piaget and also to language
　　development in children.
　　So PRJ’s theory of cognitive development--- PRJ’s suggested that because
　　they don’t have language, children younger than 18-24 months leave in the
　　here and now that is they lack the mean to symbolic represent object, and
　　events, that will not physically presented. Everybody get that? PRJ proposed
　　that young children don’t have way to represent things that aren’t wide in front
　　of them. That’s what language does, right? Words represent things, ideas.
　　Once language started to develop for about age 2, they do has a system for
　　symbolic representation and can talk about things which are not in there in
　　immediate environment including the past. Of course he didn’t claim that
　　infants don’t have any sort of memory it is acknowledged that they can
　　recognize some stimuli, like faces. And for many years this model were very
　　much in favors in psychology, even thought memory tests were never
　　performed on young children.
　　Well, finally in the 1980s, study was done. And this study show that very young
　　children under age of 2 do have capacity for recall. Now if we children cannot
　　talk, how was the recall tested? Well, that is a good question, since the
　　capacity for recall has always been linked with the ability to talk. So the
　　researcher set up an experiment using imitation based texts. The adults use
　　probable toys or other objects to demonstrate action that has 2 steps. The
　　children were asked to imitate the steps immediately and then he again after
　　lays off one or month. And even after delay, the children could…couldn’t call or
　　replicate the action, the objects they used, and the steps involved and the
　　order of the steps. Even children young is 9 months, now, test showed that
　　there was a faster way of forgetting among the youngest children but most
　　importantly it shows that the development of the recall did not depend on
　　language development. And that was the importance finding. I guess I should
　　add that the findings, don’t say there was no connection between the
　　development of language and memory. There are some of evidence that are
　　being able to talk about the event does lead to having a strong memory of that
　　event. But that does not seem the real issue here.
　　So, back to our question about the cause of the childhood amnesia, well, there
　　is something called the rate of forgetting. And childhood amnesia may reflect
　　high rate of forgetting, in other words, children under age of 3 do form memory
　　and do so without language. But they forget the memories at a fast rate,
　　probably faster than adults do. Researcher has set standards….sort of
　　unexpected rate of forgetting, but that expected rate was set based on the
　　tests done on the adults. So what is the rate of forgetting for children under the
　　age of 3? We expected to be high, but the tests disproved these really haven’t
　　been done yet.