来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年1月27日
本文适合英语二考生
Making simple up and down hand movements while speaking may influence the way people hear what you are saying. We often use meaningless movements, such as waving our hands, known as beat gestures when speaking face to face. These typically align with prominent words in speech.
说话时做简单的上下手势可能会影响人们听你说话的方式。我们经常使用无意义的动作，比如面对面说话时挥手，我们称之为节奏手势。这些手势通常与讲话中突出的词一致。
“Politicians use these gestures all the time to get their message across,” says Hans Rutger Bosker at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
荷兰马克斯·普朗克心理语言学研究所的汉斯·拉特格·博斯克说：“政客们总是用这些手势来传达他们的信息。”
Bosker and his colleagues tested how important these movements are in influencing sound recognition. They presented Dutch participants with videos of Bosker saying Dutch words that have two meanings depending on which syllables are stressed. Bosker paired each word with a beat gesture either on the first syllable or the second syllable.
博斯克和他的同事们测试了这些动作在影响声音识别方面的重要性。他们向荷兰参与者展示博斯克说荷兰语单词的视频，根据重读音节的不同，这些单词有两个意思。博斯克在每个单词的第一个音节或第二个音节上用节奏手势配对。
The team found that participants were on average 20 per cent more likely to hear stress on a syllable if there was a beat gesture on it. Mismatched beat gestures also biased what they heard, with 40 per cent of participants hearing the wrong sound.
研究小组发现，如果一个音节上有节奏手势，参与者平均有20%的可能性听到重音。不匹配的节奏手势也会让他们听到的声音产生偏差，40%的参与者听到了错误的声音。
“The timing of even the simplest hand movement is vital to face-to-face communication,” says Bosker. “We’ve shown how multimodal speech perception really is,” he says.
博斯克说：“即使是最简单的手部动作的时机，对面对面交流也是至关重要的”。他说：“我们已经展示了多模态言语感知的真正意义”。
This could be a learned association, but there could be an evolutionary reason behind it says Wim Pouw at Radboud University in Nijmegen, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Manual gestures, like those with a beat quality, interact with the vocal system by using muscles that can increase lung pressure. This affects vocal qualities associated with stressed speech,” says Pouw. He suggests that observing these gestures helps us to perceive these changes in vocal qualities.
没有参与这项研究的内梅亨大学的维姆·普乌说，这可能是一种学习关联，但这背后可能有进化原因。“手势，比如带有节拍的手势，通过肌肉与发声系统互动，从而增加肺压。这影响了与重读讲话相关的声音品质，”Pouw说。他认为，观察这些手势有助于我们察觉声音品质的变化。
Although only tested in Dutch, Bosker says similar effects may be seen in other similar languages such as English, and may even be present in all languages. “This effect could be generalised to much more than just Dutch, but this is highly speculative,” he says.
博斯克说，尽管只对荷兰语进行了测试，但类似的效应可能会在其他类似的语言中出现，比如英语，甚至可能存在于所有的语言中。他表示：“这种效应可以推广到远不止荷兰语，但这是高度推测性的。”
Bosker says that his research is even more important during the current coronavirus pandemic. “With people wearing face masks, we can’t lip read. Our data explains how much communication can be improved if we gesture along,” he says.
博斯克说，在当前的新冠大流行期间，他的研究甚至更加重要。“人们都戴着口罩，我们不能读唇语。我们的数据说明，如果我们用手势进行交流，可以在多大程度上改善沟通。”