(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
Humans have always considered themselves special compared with other animals.
One reason is the complexity of our language—bounded by unique rules, such as syntax, where we string words together in a specific order to create meaningful sentences.
But it turns out a bird may also vocalize with syntax rules—the Japanese great tit, a bird that's a close relative of North America's very own chickadee.
Toshitaka Suzuki, of Japan's Graduate University for Advanced Studies, has been listening to the calls of the Japanese great tit for the past decade.
Suzuki has recorded at least ten alarm calls used by the bird.
These include, known as the ABC call, which alerts other great tits to the presence of a predator, and the D call, which signals the birds to approach the caller.
Now Suzuki and his colleagues have found that the great tit uses those calls together to deliver both messages to other birds.
And they found that the order of that call was essential—only ABC-D made sense to the birds.
When the scientists intentionally reversed the order to create a D-ABC call, the birds did not respond.
The study is in the journal Nature Communications.
“I think the really interesting thing is why the order matters, and figuring that out I think will be difficult but also potentially really, really interesting, because it'll give a lot of insight...”
David Wheatcroft of Sweden's Uppsala University, one of the study scientists.
“You wouldn't expect sort of naively that it would matter.
Obviously it matters in human language, the order in which we say things, but it's still somehow shocking when you find it in tits.
So I think understanding why it's the case will be really interesting in the future.”
The work could help explain the evolution of the building blocks and structure of our own languages.
参考译文
同其他动物相比时，人类总是认为自己与众不同。
其中一个原因就是因为我们语言的复杂性—比如语法的独特规则，我们会将单词按照特定的语序串在一起组成有意义的语句。
但研究结果表明鸟类的叫声也有自己的句法规则—比如北美山雀的近亲，日本大山雀就是这样。
在过去10年中，日本高级研究所的铃木俊孝一直从事本国大山雀叫声的研究。
铃木已经记录下这种鸟知识10种的警示性叫声。
其中包括用以警示其他大山雀这里有捕食者的ABC叫声，还有示意其他鸟可以接近的D叫声。
现在铃木和他的同事们发现大山雀也使用这样的叫声向其他同类传递信息。
而且他们还发现，叫声的顺序至关重要—其他鸟类只能理解ABC-D的叫声。
当科学家们将叫声顺序有意改成D-ABC时，这些鸟没有任何回应。
这项研究已在《自然交流》杂志上发表。
“我认为真正有趣的地方在于为什么叫声顺序如此重要，而想要揭开这个谜团可能会非常困难，但这将会很有趣，因为这将为我们提供很多帮助…”，
瑞典乌普萨拉大学的科学家大卫·威特克罗夫特说道:
“你千万不要天真的以为这不重要。
语序在我们人类的语言中具有非凡意义，但是令人吃惊的是大山雀的叫声中也是如此。
因此我觉得寻找其中的原因在未来会很有趣。”
这项工作可能会帮助我们解释人类语言模块及结构的进化历程。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
1.compare with 比较
例句:Compare with the others.
和其他人相比。
2.turn out 关掉;结果是
例句:If I had known my life was going to turn out like this, I would have let them kill me.
如果我早知道自己的人生结局会是如此，我当时宁愿让他们杀了我。
3.figure out 想出; 解决
例句:It took them about one month to figure out how to start the equipment.
他们花了大约1个月的时间才搞清楚如何启动设备。
4.human language 人类的语言
例句:Linguistics is a branch of study on human language.
语言学是人类语言中的一个分枝。
