经济学人 | 为什么说话时总会忍不住比划手势？

Gestures are a subtle and vital form of communication

手势是一种微妙而重要的交流方式

Susan Goldin-Meadow explains why and how in “Thinking With Your Hands”

苏珊·戈尔丁·梅多在《用手思考》一书中解释了缘由及方法

“Tie an Italian’s hands behind his back,” runs an old joke, “and he’ll be speechless.” The gag rests on a national stereotype: Italians are voluble and emotional, and all that arm-waggling supposedly goes to prove it.

有个老笑话是这样说的：“把一个意大利人的手绑在背后，他会说不出话来。” 这个笑话是基于一种民族刻板印象：意大利人能说会道、感情丰富，所有这些挥舞手臂的行为都证明了这一点。

Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago has a rather different view. Emotions come out in lots of ways: facial expressions, posture, tone of voice and so on. But people are doing something different when they use gestures with speech, which she sums up in the title of her new book, “Thinking With Your Hands”. It is a masterly tour through a lifetime’s research.

芝加哥大学的苏珊·戈尔丁·梅多则有着截然不同的看法。情绪有很多表现方式：面部表情、姿势、语调等等。但当人们在说话时使用手势时，他们会做一些不同的事情，她在新书《用手思考》的标题中总结了这一点。这是一次贯穿一生的究极研究之旅。

Virtually everyone gestures, not just Italians. Experimental subjects, told after a research session that they were being watched for gestures, apologise for not having made any—but were doing so the entire time. Conference interpreters gesture in their little booths, though no one is looking.

不仅仅是意大利人，几乎每个人都会做手势。实验对象在一次研究会议结束后被告知，他们正在被观察手势，他们为自己没有做任何手势而道歉——但其实一直在做。会议口译员在他们的小隔间里做手势，尽管没有人注意。

People born blind gesture when they speak, including to each other. A woman born without arms but with “ phantom limb syndrome” describes how she uses her phantom arms when she talks—but not when she walks. All this suggests that cognition is, to some extent, “embodied”; thinking is not all done in your head.

天生失明的人在说话时会做手势，包括互相说话时也会做。一位天生没有手臂但患有“幻肢综合征”的女性描述了她在说话时（而不是在走路时）是如何使用幻肢的。所有这些都表明，认知在某种程度上是“具体化的”；思考并不全是在脑子里完成的。

The gesture under discussion here is mostly the “co-speech” kind. It is much more abstract than mime (in which exaggerated acting tells a story). Nor are these “ emblematic ” gestures like a thumbs-up or a finger over the lips for “Silence!” Like words, those are fixed within cultures (but vary between them).

这里讨论的手势主要是“伴随说话”的那种。它比哑剧（用夸张的表演来讲述故事）抽象得多。这些“象征性”的手势也不像竖起大拇指或把手指放在嘴唇上表示“安静!” 就像单词一样，这些手势在不同文化中是固定的（但因文化而异）。

Instead, gestures that accompany speech are a second channel of information. Subjects watch a film in which a cat runs but are told to lie and say it jumped. They do so in words—while their hands make a running motion.

相反，伴随着说话的手势是第二个信息渠道。研究对象观看了一部电影，影片中一只猫在奔跑，但被告知要撒谎并说它在跳。他们会用语言来表达，而手却做着奔跑的动作。

People who say they believe in sexual equality but gesture with their hands lower when talking about women are not indicating women’s shorter stature; they can be shown to have biases of which they may be unaware.

那些说自己相信男女平等，但在谈论女性时把手放低的人，并不是在暗示女性身材较矮；他们可能会表现出自己都没有意识到的偏见。

Gesture is also not sign language. Sign languages have clearly defined words and grammar, and differ from place to place just as spoken ones do. Professor Goldin-Meadow spends a lot of time on homesign—systems of signs typically developed by deaf children in hearing families who are not exposed to (and so never learn) a conventional sign language.

手势也不是手语。手语有明确的词汇和语法定义，并且和口语一样因地而异。戈尔丁·梅多教授花了大量时间研究家庭手语系统，这类手语系统通常是由听力正常的家庭中的失聪儿童开发的，他们没有接触过（因此从未学习过）传统的手语。

Such children are essentially inventing rough but rich languages out of nothing, with features such as fixed word order and hierarchical grammatical structures much like those in fully fledged languages. Such homesign systems far outstrip their parents’ gestures; a parent’s raised finger meaning “Wait” may be adopted by a child to connote events in the future.

这些孩子基本上是在无中生有地创造粗糙而又丰富的语言，这些语言具有固定的词序和等级语法结构等特征，就像那些成熟的语言一样。这样的家庭手语系统远复杂于他们父母的手势；父母竖起的手指表示“等待”的意思可能会被孩子用来暗示未来的事件。

In “The Crown”, Lady Diana is warned that her hands may betray her real emotions, which could be dangerous; they are tied together so she can learn to speak without gesticulating. No one who reads this book could ever again think that gesturing shows only a lack of control. It is about thinking and communication, and is a sophisticated aid to both.

在《王冠》中，戴安娜被警告说，她的手可能会泄露她的真实情感，这可能是危险的；将双手束缚，这样她就可以在说话时不再比划。任何读过这本书的人都不会再认为手势只是缺乏控制的表现。它关乎思考和交流，是对两者的一种复杂的辅助。

(红色标注词为重难点词汇)

重难点词汇 ：