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  3. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci

A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci

游客2024-01-02  21
问题    A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that nouns actually take longer to spit out than verbs do, presumably because they require more thought to produce. In the study, researchers led by Frank Seifart, a linguist at the University of Amsterdam, and Balthasar Bickel, of the University of Zurich, analyzed hundreds of recordings of spontaneous speech from nine very different languages from around the world: English and Dutch, as well as several others from as far a field as Amazonia, Siberia, the Kalahari, and Tibet. They picked out and compared the spoken renditions of the nouns and verbs, focusing not on how long it took for each word to be spoken but on what was happening in the half-second preceding each word. That tiny window is informative: cognitive scientists have concluded that it takes the brain about that long to formulate its next word, which happens even as a current word or phrase is being spoken. Which is to say, the future word casts a shadow over the present one. And that shadow is measurable: the researchers found that, in all nine languages, the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb — either a brief silence or a filler, such as "uh" or "urn" or their non-English equivalents. Seifart and Bickel think that this has to do with the different roles that nouns and verbs play in language. Nouns require more planning to say because they more often convey novel information. Seifart said that’s one reason why we quickly transition from nouns to pronouns when speaking. Listeners are sensitive to those tiny pauses before a noun, and interpret them as indicating that what follows will be something new or important.
   However, a sentence can be a sentence without nouns or adjectives, but never without a verb, for the most part. Verbs are grammatically more complex than nouns but have less to reveal. When you’re about to say a verb, you’re less likely to be saying something new, so your brain doesn’t have to slow down what it’s already doing to plan for it. Oddly enough, the one language that doesn’t seem to pre-think its nouns as thoroughly as its verbs is English, Seifart and Bickel found. Although English speakers do slow down their speech immediately before a noun, they use fewer pauses beforehand, not more, when compared to verbs. "English is peculiar," Seifart said. English is less useful than we might imagine for understanding what our speech has to say about how we think: "It can never be representative of human language in general," he said. "To make claims about human language in general, we need to look at much broader array of them." In recent years, scientists have grown concerned that much of the literature on human psychology and behavior is derived from studies carried out in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries. These results aren’t necessarily indicative of how humans as a whole actually function. Linguistics may face a similar challenge—the science is in a bubble, talking to itself. "This is what makes people like me realize the unique value of small, often endangered languages and documenting them for as long as they can still be observed," Seifart said. "In a few generations, they will not be spoken anymore." In the years to come, as society grows more complex, the number of nouns available to us may grow exponentially. The diversity of its speakers, not so much.
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答案     本周，一项发布在《美国国家科学院院刊》(Proceedings of the National Academy of Scierices)的研究显示，说出一个名词所需的时间往往比动词所需的时间长，这很有可能是因为说出名词之前需要更多的思考。在这项研究中，由阿姆斯特丹大学(the University of Amsterdam)的语言学家弗兰克-塞法特(Frank Seifart)与苏黎世大学(the University of Zurich)的巴尔萨泽-比克尔(Balthasar Bickel)所带领的研究团队，分析了几百份即兴演讲录音。它们是九种来自世界各地的截然不同的语言，其中包括英语、荷兰语，以及几种来自遥远的亚马孙地区、西伯利亚地区、卡拉哈里沙漠和西藏地区的语言。他们从中挑出一些录音，然后把名词和动词的发音情况进行对比，关注点聚焦在每个单词发音前的半秒钟，而并非该单词发音所需时间的长短。这一巧妙的视角提供了大量的信息，研究认知学的科学家因此得出结论：大脑需要一定长度的时间来思考下一个要说的单词，即便是说话人正在说当下的单词或短语，这一过程也会同时进行。也就是说，即将要说出口的单词会对正在说的单词产生影响，而这种影响是显著的。研究者发现，在九种语言的录音中，每当说话人要说到一个名词时，其所需的停顿时间，比要说到动词时长0．35秒。而在其中的八种语言中，说话人说名词之前，停顿的次数大约是说动词之前的两倍——这种情况无论是在短暂沉默的间隙，还是在说“嗯”“呃”等语气词以及其他非语言行为的时候，都会发生。塞法特和比克尔认为，这与名词和动词在语言中扮演的不同角色有关。说话人在说出名词之前需要多加思量，其原因在于名词通常包含新的信息。塞法特表示，这也是人们在表达时能快速用代词替换名词的原因之一。听者对说话人说到名词之前的微小停顿非常敏感，同时也把这种停顿视作一种暗示，表明接下来要讲的会是新内容或重要内容。
    然而，句子可以没有名词或者形容词，但在绝大多数情况下却不能没有动词。从语法层面来看，动词的变化比名词要复杂，但要传达的信息却不多。你在说到动词时，不太可能说到新鲜的事物，因此，你的大脑不必为紧接着要表达的内容而放慢思考的脚步。奇怪的是，塞法特和比克尔发现，英语不需要像提前仔细考虑动词的用法那样，提前仔细考虑名词的用法。尽管英语说话人的确会在说名词前立刻放缓语速，但比起说到动词之前的停顿次数，他们说到名词之前，停顿会更少一些。塞法特说：“英语是一种独特的语言。”如果想要弄清我们如何用语言表达所思所想，那么英语所发挥的作用要比我们想象的小。“英语永远无法成为人类的共通语言。”他说道，“要想找到确切的人类共通语言，我们需要以更广阔的视野来审视世界上所有的语言。”近年来，科学家们逐渐关注到，有关人类心理和行为研究的文献大都源自西方国家的研究，这些国家教育水平高、工业化成熟、国民生活富裕、社会制度民主。但这些研究结果并不一定能充分说明人类真实的行为。语言学可能也面临着相似的难题——语言科学更像是泡沫里的自说自话。“这让和我一样研究语言的人们意识到，小众且濒危的语言具有独特的价值，只要这样的语言还有人说，我们就会一直研究下去。”塞法特说道，“再过几代人，就没人会说这些语言了。”今后，随着社会发展越来越多元化，我们接触到的名词数量会成倍激增，而不同语言的使用群体却未必如此。
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