送交者: insight 于 2005-5-05, 22:59:23:
回答: My theory: it is bottom-up VS top-down processes 由 insight 于 2005-5-05, 22:40:35:
1) A child's learning starts from ths very primitive brain functions: perception and emotion, which are sort of action and reaction without much self-consciousness. At this stage, perception involves mainly audio and visual images. This lays the foundaction for phonology.
2) Gradually the child's self-conciousness develops and starts to take control of his/her mental activities,which means it can manipulate the audio/visual images at will to generate imaginations and feelings. As a result, the meanings of things emerge. Thus the child can express himself with sounds meaningfully while running his imagination in his brain. And he begins to aquire the grammar and semantics of a language.
3) At later stages, consciousness further develops, and the child starts to use induction to form abstract concepts and learn abstract symbols, such as alphabets and words. And these abstract symbols can then be linked to imaginations developed earlier, which are run like virtual reality in computer terminology.
4) Many adults, on the other hand, learn a foreign language in a reverse order, simply because he has a fully developed capabilty to acqiure abstract symbols due to his strong self-conciousness.