你的演讲中充满无意识的、令人不解或误解的信息 作者：JULIE SEDIVY 译者：唐 萧 校对：刘 蕊 编辑：唐 萧 Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages 你的演讲中充满无意识的、令人不解或误解的信息 本文选自 Nautilus | 取经号原创翻译 关注 取经号，回复关键词“外刊” 获取《经济学人》等原版外刊获得方法 Imagine standing up to give a speech in front of a critical audience. As you do your best to wax eloquent, someone in the room uses a clicker to conspicuously count your every stumble, hesitation, um and uh; once you’ve finished, this person loudly announces how many of these blemishes have marred your presentation. 想象一下，你做着演讲，底下是一群挑剔的观众。你尽力表现得雄辩，房间里的某个人却拿着个计时器，高调记下你的每次打绊、卡壳，以及“嗯嗯啊啊”。你刚讲完，这个人就大声宣布你演讲的时候犯了多少次这些错误。
This is exactly the tactic used by the Toastmasters public-speaking club, in which a designated “Ah Counter” is charged with tallying up the speaker’s slip-ups as part of the training regimen. The goal is total eradication. The club’s punitive measures may be extreme, but they reflect the folk wisdom that ums and uhs betray a speaker as weak, nervous, ignorant, and sloppy, and should be avoided at all costs, even in spontaneous conversation. 公开演讲俱乐部Toastermasters采用的正是这种策略。在它的训练体系中，会有一位专门的“赘字记录官”负责记下演讲者的每次口误。记录冗余表达是为了消除它们。该俱乐部的惩罚措施可能会非常极端，但这些措施也反映出一种普遍认知，即“嗯”、“啊”这些词是演讲者能力差、紧张、无知、敷衍的表现，应尽一切努力避免它们，即使是在自然的、不做预设的对话情境中，也是一样。 Many scientists, though, think that our cultural fixation with stamping out what they call “disfluencies” is deeply misguided. Saying um is no character flaw, but an organic feature of speech; far from distracting listeners, there’s evidence that it focuses their attention in ways that enhance comprehension. 在我们的文化中，演讲须得祛除那些“不流畅的因素”，但科学家却认为，这种刻板印象是完全不合理的。演讲时说“嗯”不是性格缺点，而是演讲本来就有的一个特征。已有证据表明，它不仅不会分散听众的注意力，反而能吸引他们的注意力，加深理解。
Disfluencies arise mainly because of the time pressures inherent in speaking. Speakers don’t pre-plan an entire sentence and then mentally press “play” to begin unspooling it. If they did, they’d probably need to pause for several seconds between each sentence as they assembled it, and it’s doubtful that they could hold a long, complex sentence in working memory. Instead, speakers talk and think at the same time, launching into speech with only a vague sense of how the sentence will unfold, taking it on faith that by the time they’ve finished uttering the earlier portions of the sentence, they’ll have worked out exactly what to say in the later portions. Mostly, the timing works out, but occasionally it takes longer than expected to find the right phrase. Saying “um” is the speaker’s way of signaling that processing is ongoing, the verbal equivalent of a computer’s spinning circle. People sometimes have more disfluencies while speaking in public, ironically, because they are trying hard not to misspeak. 讲话时的不流畅主要是时间压力造成的。讲话人并不会提前组织好一整个句子，然后在脑子里按下“播放”键就开始口若悬河。如果他们这么做了，他们可能需要在组织句子表达时在句与句之间有几秒停顿。而且，如果他们能够在工作记忆中说出复杂的长句，那也是值得怀疑的。如果他们没有提前组织好句子，就会一边说一边思考，讲话的时候只会对句子该如何展开有一个大概的规划，同时也坚信，当他们说完一句话的前半部分，就能够准确说出后半部分。多数时候，这个时间节点还把握地挺好的，但偶尔还是要花费超出预期的时间找到合适的表达。说“嗯”是讲话人在告诉大家，思考的过程还持续着，就好比是电脑缓冲圈的口头版本一样。有时，人们在公共场合讲话时会更磕绊，这是因为他们想努力地让自己说的话更顺畅。真是讽刺。
Since disfluencies show that a speaker is thinking carefully about what she is about to say, they provide useful information to listeners, cueing them to focus attention on upcoming content that’s likely to be meaty. One famous example comes from the movie Jurassic Park. When Jeff Goldblum’s character is asked whether a group of only female animals can breed, he replies, “No, I’m, I’m simply saying that life, uh…finds a way.” The disfluencies emphasize that he’s coming to grips with something not easy to explain—an idea that turns out to be a key part of the movie. 由于不流畅就意味着说话人是在仔细斟酌自己将要说出口的话，那些不流畅的地方就为听者提供了有用的信息，暗示他们集中精神听下面的内容，因为那可能会很重要。这里可以举一个著名电影《侏罗纪公园》里面的例子。当杰夫·高布伦扮演的角色被问到是否一个全由雌性生物组成的种群也能生育时，他回答说，“不，我呢，我只是在说，生命……唔……总会自行找到出路。”句子里面不顺畅的地方表明，他正努力表达一个不易阐释的东西——一个后来在电影中十分重要的观念。
Experiments with ums or uhs spliced in or out of speech show that when words are preceded by disfluencies, listeners recognize them faster and remember them more accurately. In some cases, disfluencies allow listeners to make useful predictions about what they’re about to hear. In one study, for example, listeners correctly inferred that speakers’ stumbles meant that they were describing complicated conglomerations of shapes rather than to simple single shapes. 有人对演讲中有无“嗯”、“啊”做了研究，结果表明，如果话里面有一些不流畅的地方，那么听者会更迅速地辨认出这些话，记得也会更准确。有时候，不流畅使得听者能够对接下来要听到的内容作出有用的预判。比如说，在一项研究中，听者正确推断到，讲话人打磕绊的地方意味着他们在描述复杂形状的混合物，而不是简单单一形状的混合物。 Disfluencies can also improve our comprehension of longer pieces of content. Psychologists Scott Fraundorf and Duane Watson tinkered with recordings of a speaker’s retellings of passages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and compared how well listeners remembered versions that were purged of all disfluencies as opposed to ones that contained an average number of ums and uhs (about two instances out of every 100 words). They found that hearers remembered plot points better after listening to the disfluent versions, with enhanced memory apparent even for plot points that weren’t preceded by a disfluency. Stripping a speech of ums and uhs, as Toastmasters are intent on doing, appears to be doing listeners no favors. 不流畅还可以加深我们对较长内容的理解。心理学家斯科特·弗劳恩多夫和杜安·华生将一位讲话人阅读《爱丽丝梦游仙境》后的重述做了录音，并研究了听者是对完全没有磕绊的版本记得更清还是对有些许“嗯”、“啊”穿插的版本记得更牢（平均每一百个单词出现两次）。他们发现，听者听不流畅版录音后，对单个重点的记忆更加牢固，而得益于此，他们甚至也能对出现在流畅语流中的单个点记得更好。这样看来，像Toastermasters那样致力于从演讲中祛除“嗯”、“啊”等词，似乎对听者并不友好。 Moreover, there’s reason to question the implicit assumption that disfluencies reveal a speaker’s lack of knowledge. In a study led by Kathryn Womack, experienced physicians and residents in training looked at images of various dermatological conditions while talking their way to a diagnosis. Not surprisingly, the expert doctors were more accurate in their diagnoses than the residents. They also produced more complex sentences—and a greater number of disfluencies, giving lie to the notion that disfluencies reflect a lack of control over one’s material. On the contrary, the study’s authors suggest that the seasoned doctors had more disfluent speech because they were sifting through a larger body of knowledge and constructing more detailed explanations while planning their speech. 再者，大众有一种盲目的认知，即讲话不流畅是讲话人知识匮乏的表现。但这一点很值得质疑。在一项由Kathryn Womack牵头的研究中，经验丰富的内科医师和仍在训练中的住院医生一边看不同种类的皮肤病图片，一边说着自己的诊断方式。自然，技术精湛的医生要比住院医生的诊断更准确。同时，他们说的句子也更复杂，磕绊也更多。这就证明，那种认为不流畅即证明讲话人对自己所说的东西不了解的观点是站不住脚的。相反地，该项目的研究人员表示，经验老道的医生之所以说话更磕绊，是因为他们要在更大的知识范围内搜寻，并在组织讲话的同时产出更细致的阐释。 If disfluencies appear to generally help communication more than they hinder it, why are they so stigmatized? Writer and linguist Michael Erard argues in his book Um… that historically, public speakers have been blissfully unconcerned with disinfecting their speech of disfluencies until about the 20th Century—possibly because neither hearers nor speakers consciously noticed them until it became possible to record and replay spoken language in all its circuitous and halting glory. The aversion to disfluencies may well have arisen from speakers’ horror at hearing their own recorded voices. Erard suggests that the modern repugnance for disfluencies is less an assessment of a person’s speech than it is a “deeper judgment about how much control he should have over his self-presentation and his identity.” In truth, disfluencies appear to distract mainly those who have been trained to revile them. 如果不流畅总的来说能促进而非阻碍交流，那为什么人们还会对它颇有微词呢？作家、语言学家迈克尔·拉尔在他的《嗯……》一书中解释道，从历史上看，21世纪以前，人们在公共场合讲话时还没有祛除赘余词的意识——也许是因为彼时录音、回放和暂停技术尚未成型，无论是听者还是讲话人都没有那个意识去关注这些不流畅的地方。对不流畅的厌恶很可能来自于讲话人害怕听到自己录音的恐惧。拉尔说，现代意义上对不流畅的憎恶已经不太是衡量一个人演讲水平的标准，而更多地是一种“判断讲话人有多了解自己所讲的内容和自我身份的指数”。事实上，面对讲话中不流畅的地方时，分心的似乎主要是那些一直誓要消除不流畅的人。 Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that public speaking is different from day-to-day communication, that it’s a performance in which the artist is meant to demonstrate almost superhuman mastery over speech and make verbal virtuosity look easy precisely because of the absence of cues that reveal its complexity. Maybe so. But the prohibition of ums should be recognized for what it is—a display focused on presenting the speaker in a flattering light—and not mistaken for courtesy directed at the listener. 或许又会有人说了，在公共场合讲话与日常交流是不同的，前者要求讲话人表现出几乎是神一般的演讲技巧，行云流水地呈现精湛的语言技术——因为演讲中是无法感知到这种技术的复杂性的。也许吧。但对“嗯”、“啊”的禁止应被当做它本质上的东西来认可——一种把关注重点放在讲话人的表现上，而不是为了取悦听者。 In fact, designers of synthesized voice systems, who often are rather solicitous when it comes to the hearer’s ease and comfort, have begun experimenting with the insertion of naturalistic disfluencies into artificial speech (though it’s too soon to tell whether listeners respond to these as they do to human disfluencies). It’s an irony of our age that robots, unconcerned with ego, may be busy putting disfluencies into their speech just as humans, preoccupied with their self-images, are submitting to strenuous training to take them out. |
|
|
来自： alayavijnana > 《生活时尚》
