词汇大师-- Where Spoken Languages Divide

　　AA:   I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: word order and the mind.
A new study suggests that people naturally gesture in the order of subject-object-verb, regardless of the rules of their spoken language. Susan Goldin-Meadow is a psychology¹ professor at the University of Chicago.
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "I did this study in part because of the work that I have been doing on deaf children who are too deaf to acquire spoken language. I've been studying in China and America and in Turkey and now in Nicaragua, and in none of those places have these particular children been exposed to sign language. So they use gesture to make up their own languages.
"What we see in the deaf children is they tend to indicate objects that are acted upon before they gesture the actions. We might say 'beat the drum' but the kid would produce a gesture for the drum before producing a gesture for the beating action."
AA: "So kind of like 'drum beat.'"
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "Yes, 'drum beat.'"
RS: "What they actually see -- I mean, the bigger object, the most important thing first, and then what action is occurring."
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "You could think about it either way. So we can have an intuition that the most important thing to do is to get the object out there and then to s ay the action. The other possibility, however, is to think that if you have the action out there, then it tells you what the object is doing and what role it's going to play, and therefore you could sort of -- it almost sets the stage for the role that the object is going to play."
AA: "And so these findings with deaf children led you to explore how people gesture -- people who can speak and have spoken language."
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "Right, we wanted to force people to 'talk' in gesture and to see what would come out."
RS: "Why would you want to do that?"
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "Well, in part to see whether -- what we expected, actually, was that the language I speak would influence the gestures that I create. But what in fact we found is that people differ in the spoken language they use, but they don't differ in the gestured languages they use. And what it suggests is that this sort of order that you find in gesture is, first of all, not influenced by language.
"And, secondly², it looks like it's a pretty basic and robust³ pattern that's found across all speakers independent of the language that you use. So it suggests that maybe there's a cognitive⁴ underpinning⁵ to it -- that maybe we think about the world in this particular way, despite the fact that we talk about it in different ways."
RS: "So the same thing that you found with deaf children you found in English, Mandarin⁶, Spanish and Turkish speakers."
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "For the most part, yes."
AA: "Let me ask you about the standard structure in English, we know, is subject-verb-object."
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "Right."
AA: "Now what about the other languages you studied."
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "So in Spanish it's the same. In Turkish it's subject-object-verb."
AA: "So for example?"
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "'Girl drum beat,' as opposed to 'girl beat drum.'"
AA: "And Mandarin?"
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "In Mandarin it actually varies as a function of whether the action crosses space or not. So I might say 'girl drum beat,' but 'girl give drum to boy.' So it might be S-O-V when you're talking about an action in place, but S-V-O when you're talking about moving an object to another place. What I've heard is that Mandarin is changing in its word order, and consequently you find variability. So in our speakers, they were more variable than either the Turkish speakers or the English or Spanish speakers."
RS: "Do you think this gives people around the world new hope that they can communicate?"
AA: "Well, let me ask you, with the Olympics going on, do you imagine that this sort of hard-wired, default subject-object-verb sentence structure is helping⁷ people communicate at the Games in Beijing?"
SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW: "Well, it's hard to know. I don't know whether this is hard-wired, so let's start with that assumption. It may be something that we develop, so I don't know whether it's hard-wired or not. But I do think it's robust, and in that sense it might make it easier for all of us to think in these ways.
"And consequently, if people are trying to communicate by gesture, maybe it'd be better for them to just not talk at all, and gesture. [Laughter] Because when you're gesturing, well, if you think about it, when you're gesturing along with your talk, your gestures fit the talk, so we gesture differently.
"I mean, initially⁸ we started to do this study and we've shown already that people gesture differently when they talk English, than when they talk Spanish and when they talk Turkish. There are differences in how we gesture. So it might be easier for people at the Olympics to get along if they stopped talking and just gestured!"
AA:   We'll have more on this topic of gestures and spoken language next week with Susan Goldin-Meadow from the University of Chicago. And that's all for WORDMASTER this week. Archives are at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

2 secondly   

adv.第二，其次

参考例句：

• Secondly,use your own head and present your point of view.第二，动脑筋提出自己的见解。
• Secondly it is necessary to define the applied load.其次，需要确定所作用的载荷。

3 robust   

adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的

参考例句：

• She is too tall and robust.她个子太高，身体太壮。
• China wants to keep growth robust to reduce poverty and avoid job losses,AP commented.美联社评论道，中国希望保持经济强势增长，以减少贫困和失业状况。

4 cognitive   

adj.认知的，认识的，有感知的

参考例句：

• As children grow older,their cognitive processes become sharper.孩子们越长越大，他们的认知过程变得更为敏锐。
• The cognitive psychologist is like the tinker who wants to know how a clock works.认知心理学者倒很像一个需要通晓钟表如何运转的钟表修理匠。

5 underpinning   

n.基础材料；基础结构；（学说、理论等的）基础；（人的）腿v.用砖石结构等从下面支撑（墙等）( underpin的现在分词 )；加固（墙等）的基础；为（论据、主张等）打下基础；加强

参考例句：

• Underpinning this success has been an exemplary record of innovation. 具有典范性的创新确保了这次成功。 来自辞典例句
• But underpinning Mr Armstrong's technology changes is a human touch. 但阿姆斯特朗技术变革的支柱是人情味。 来自互联网

6 Mandarin   

n.中国官话，国语，满清官吏；adj.华丽辞藻的

参考例句：

• Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
• Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。

7 helping   

n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的

参考例句：

• The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
• By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。

8 initially   

adv.最初，开始

参考例句：

• The ban was initially opposed by the US.这一禁令首先遭到美国的反对。
• Feathers initially developed from insect scales.羽毛最初由昆虫的翅瓣演化而来。