词汇大师-- Our Brains Don't Always Know

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Pronouns and why they're harder for your brain to understand than you might think. Pronouns are words like he, she, it, we, you, they … and lots more.
RS: They act as shortcuts¹ so we don't have to repeat what we're talking about over and over again. Our guest published an essay about her self-declared obsession² with pronouns.

　　JESSICA LOVE: "My name is Jessica Love. I'm a fourth-year graduate student in cognitive³ psychology⁴ at Ohio State and I study psycholinguistics, which is basically the study of how the mind is able to learn and use language."
AA: "I learned two new terms -- at least two new terms -- from your article, which [were] unheralded pronouns and dummy⁵ pronouns."
RS: "What are those?"
AA: "Yeah, what are those?"
JENNIFER LOVE: "'Unheralded pronouns' is basically a fancy way of saying you're using a pronoun where the referent isn't immediately in the discourse⁶ environment. So the example I give in my essay is someone coming up to me and saying 'They should be illegal' and I haven't talked to this person all day. But it just so happens that I know exactly what they're talking about because a few evenings earlier I'd set my cat on fire with a catnip candle."
RS: "Is this a true story?"
AA: "You talk about that in your essay."
JENNIFER LOVE: "It is a true story. My cat's fine now, thank you, but it was a slightly traumatic evening. I thought that catnip candles would be a good idea. I thought that I would set them up in a corner of the room and the catnip would waft⁷ through the air and my cat would roll around delightfully⁸ and a good time would be had by all. But instead he actually tried to consume the candle, and he's a big Maine coon and his belly⁹ fur is about four inches long. So he landed with all fours around the candle and his belly caught on fire.
"It's the sort of story you tell your co-workers and then they shake their heads, and two days later when they say 'They should be illegal' you know exactly what they're talking about."
AA: "So that's an unheralded pronoun, a pronoun that comes at you from nowhere but you figure it out. So what's a dummy pronoun?"
JENNIFER LOVE: "So a dummy pronoun is basically just a pronoun that we shove into English sentences because we have to have a subject. So we have to say 'It is raining.' We can't just say 'Raining.' So even though 'it' arguably doesn't mean anything -- you could argue that it means the weather or something like, but really we're just sticking it in there because we have to make the sentence grammatical."
AA: "That's so true."
RS: "Never thought about that, but yeah."
AA: "And then lastly why don't you tell us a little bit about what happens when -- you did, I guess, some experiments with getting people to use pronouns while thinking of something else?"
JENNIFER LOVE: "So if you ask someone -- and this experiment was actually done by Jennifer Arnold at University of North Carolina, Chapel¹⁰ Hill, and I think she actually gave participants numbers that they had to keep track of while telling a story, I think it was. And she found that they used fewer pronouns. They just kept repeating the proper name over and over again.
"So I give an example of someone engaged in this task and they would really be using pronouns very inappropriately. They would just say 'Corey's doing great today. Corey's had a lovely breakfast, and Corey's going to be exercising pretty soon.' Just basically repeating Corey over and over again because they couldn't keep track of how salient Corey was to the listener."
AA: "Because they are thinking at the same time of this multi-digit number -- "
JENNIFER LOVE: "Exactly."
AA: " -- in their head."
JENNIFER LOVE: "Exactly."
AA: "That was really interesting."
RS: "Well, why would we care?"
JENNIFER LOVE: "Well, we end up talking while we do a lot of other things, so it's always interesting to see what happens to our language when we're very distracted. Or when we're very stressed out. If you're expending¹¹ a lot of your resources freaking out because you're giving a speech, probably your pronoun use is going to suffer.
"And what's really interesting, I think, is there's evidence that kind of the opposite thing happens if you suffer from memory impairment. You see this sometimes in older adults, where they will just stop using proper nouns altogether because they can't access them. So they'll just stick solely¹² to pronouns. It's kind of interesting that memory burdens in different ways can do drastically different things to our pronoun use."
AA: Jessica Love is working on a doctorate¹³ in cognitive psychology at Ohio State University. Her essay in the American Scholar magazine can be found online.
RS: And that's WORDMASTER for this week. Visit us at voanews.com/wordmaster or on Facebook at VOA Learning English. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

1 shortcuts   

n.捷径( shortcut的名词复数 )；近路；快捷办法；被切短的东西（尤指烟草）

参考例句：

• In other words, experts want shortcuts to everything. 换句话说，专家需要所有的快捷方式。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Offer shortcuts from the Help menu. 在帮助菜单中提供快捷方式。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓

2 obsession   

n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感)

参考例句：

• I was suffering from obsession that my career would be ended.那时的我陷入了我的事业有可能就此终止的困扰当中。
• She would try to forget her obsession with Christopher.她会努力忘记对克里斯托弗的迷恋。

3 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。

4 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。

5 dummy   

n.假的东西；(哄婴儿的)橡皮奶头

参考例句：

• The police suspect that the device is not a real bomb but a dummy.警方怀疑那个装置不是真炸弹，只是一个假货。
• The boys played soldier with dummy swords made of wood.男孩们用木头做的假木剑玩打仗游戏。

6 discourse   

n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述

参考例句：

• We'll discourse on the subject tonight.我们今晚要谈论这个问题。
• He fell into discourse with the customers who were drinking at the counter.他和站在柜台旁的酒客谈了起来。

7 waft   

v.飘浮，飘荡；n.一股；一阵微风；飘荡

参考例句：

• The bubble maker is like a sword that you waft in the air.吹出泡泡的东西就像你在空中挥舞的一把剑。
• When she just about fall over,a waft of fragrance makes her stop.在她差点跌倒时，一股幽香让她停下脚步。

8 delightfully   

大喜，欣然

参考例句：

• The room is delightfully appointed. 这房子的设备令人舒适愉快。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The evening is delightfully cool. 晚间凉爽宜人。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

9 belly   

n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛

参考例句：

• The boss has a large belly.老板大腹便便。
• His eyes are bigger than his belly.他眼馋肚饱。

10 chapel   

n.小教堂，殡仪馆

参考例句：

• The nimble hero,skipped into a chapel that stood near.敏捷的英雄跳进近旁的一座小教堂里。
• She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel.那个星期天的下午，她在小教堂的演出，可以说是登峰造极。

11 expending   

v.花费( expend的现在分词 )；使用（钱等）做某事；用光；耗尽

参考例句：

• The heart pumps by expending and contracting of muscle. 心脏通过收缩肌肉抽取和放出（血液）。 来自互联网
• Criminal action is an action of expending cost and then producing profit. 刑事诉讼是一种需要支付成本、能够产生收益的活动。 来自互联网

12 solely   

adv.仅仅，唯一地

参考例句：

• Success should not be measured solely by educational achievement.成功与否不应只用学业成绩来衡量。
• The town depends almost solely on the tourist trade.这座城市几乎完全靠旅游业维持。

13 doctorate   

n.(大学授予的)博士学位

参考例句：

• He hasn't enough credits to get his doctorate.他的学分不够取得博士学位。
• Where did she do her doctorate?她在哪里攻读博士？