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Culture
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Johnson
约翰逊专栏
Talk with the hand
用手交谈
A new book shows that gestures are a subtle and vital form of communication.
一本新书表明，手势是一种微妙而重要的交流方式。
“Tie an italian’s hands behind his back,” runs an old joke, “and he’ll be speechless.”
“把一个意大利人的双手绑在背后，”一个老笑话说，“他就说不出话了。”
The gag rests on a national stereotype: Italians are voluble and emotional, and all that arm-waggling supposedly goes to prove it.
这个笑话基于对国家的刻板印象：意大利人健谈、感情丰富，而挥舞手臂这种举动理应证明这一点。
Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago has a rather different view.
芝加哥大学的苏珊·戈尔丁-梅多则有截然不同的观点。
Emotions come out in lots of ways: facial expressions, posture, tone of voice and so on.
情绪有很多种表达方式：面部表情、身体姿势、语调等等。
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”.
但当人们边讲话边使用手势时，他们在做一些不同的事情，戈尔丁-梅多用她新书的标题《用手思考》总结了这一点。
It is a masterly tour through a lifetime’s research.
阅读这本书就像对苏珊毕生的研究进行了一次非凡之旅。
Virtually everyone gestures, not just Italians.
几乎每个人都会打手势，不仅仅是意大利人。
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.
实验对象在研究结束后被告知研究人员在观察他们的手势，他们为自己没有做出任何手势而表示歉意，但实际上他们一直都在做手势。
Conference interpreters gesture in their little booths, though no one is looking.
会议口译员在他们的小隔间里做着手势，尽管没有人在看他们。
People born blind gesture when they speak, including to each other.
天生失明的人在说话时也会做手势，失明的人彼此交谈时也是如此。
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.
一位天生没有手臂但患有“幻肢综合症”的女性，描述了她在说话时如何使用幻肢，但在走路时却没有使用幻肢。
All this suggests that cognition is, to some extent, “embodied”; thinking is not all done in your head.
所有这些都表明，认知在某种程度上是“被体现的”，思考并非全在你的脑海中完成。
The gesture under discussion here is mostly the “co-speech” kind.
这里讨论的手势大多是“伴随话语”型手势。
It is much more abstract than mime (in which exaggerated acting tells a story).
这种手势比哑剧(用夸张的表演讲述一个故事)要抽象得多。
Nor are these “emblematic” gestures like a thumbs-up or a finger over the lips for “Silence!”
这些手势也不是“象征型”手势，象征型手势的例子有竖起大拇指，或把手指放在嘴唇上表示“安静！”
Like words, those are fixed within cultures (but vary between them).
就像词语一样，象征型手势在文化中的含义是固定的(但在不同文化之间含义有所不同)。
Instead, gestures that accompany speech are a second channel of information.
相反，伴随话语出现的手势是第二个信息渠道。
Subjects watch a film in which a cat runs but are told to lie and say it jumped.
受试者观看了一部影片，影片中一只猫在奔跑，但受试者被告知要撒谎，说猫跳了起来。
They do so in words—while their hands make a running motion.
他们说的是猫跳了起来，但他们的手做了一个奔跑的动作。
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.
一些人自称相信性别平等，但在谈论女性时他们把手放低，这不是在示意女性的身材较矮，情况可能表明他们存在偏见，而他们可能并没有意识到自己的偏见。
Gesture is also not sign language.
手势也不是手语。
Sign languages have clearly defined words and grammar, and differ from place to place just as spoken ones do.
手语对单词和语法有明确的定义，就像口语一样，不同的地方手语也不同。
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.
戈尔丁-梅多教授花了大量时间研究家庭手语，这种手语系统通常由听力正常的家庭中的失聪儿童开发，这些儿童没有接触过(因此也从没学习过)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.
从本质上说，这些儿童从无到有地发明了粗糙但丰富的语言，其中有固定的词序和层级语法结构等特征，这些特征与完全成熟的语言非常相似。
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.
这样的家庭手语系统远远超过了父母的手势，父母竖起一根手指示意“等一下”，孩子可能会用这种手势来表示未来会发生的事情。
Returning to conventional gesture, the author keeps her focus on child development.
回到传统的手势，作者继续关注儿童的发展。
Some students who fail at a tricky mathematics problem may gesture in a way that indicates they are on the verge of getting it; they should be taught differently from the ones whose gestures suggest that they are entirely at sea.
学生在解不出棘手的数学问题时，其中一些学生可能会做出某种手势，表明他们快要理解了，而另一些学生的手势则表明他们还一头雾水，对于这两种学生应该有不同的教学方式。
Children who still use only one word at a time may combine a word and a gesture; this successfully predicts that two-word phrases (“Give ball”) are just around the corner.
一次只说一个单词的孩子可能会在说一个单词的时候再做一个手势，这能成功地预测孩子不久之后就会说两个单词的短语(给球)。
And those taught to move their hands about when discussing a moral quandary with several perspectives soon start to see the problem from different points of view.
在讨论涉及不同角度的道德困境问题时，那些被教导用手做出动作的人，很快就开始从不同的角度看待问题。
All this is rounded out in a final section offering practical advice.
书中最后一节提供了实用的建议，给所有这些进行了圆满总结。
Teachers are encouraged both to use gestures themselves and to observe those their students make.
教师被鼓励不仅自己使用手势，而且要观察学生们的手势。
Parents are taught to fill in the word a child is most likely to be missing when they gesture (“That’s a dog”) rather than adding information (“That’s a fluffy one”).
家长们被教导要补上孩子做手势时最有可能遗漏的单词(“那是一只狗”)，而不是添加信息(“那是个毛茸茸的东西”)。
Children with language delays caused by brain injuries at or around birth, but who nonetheless gesture as much as their peers, are likely to catch up verbally by the age of about 30 months.
如果一些儿童在出生时或出生前后因脑部损伤而出现语言延迟，尽管如此，他们的手势与同龄人一样多，那么他们可能在约30个月大的时候就能在口头语言上赶上同龄人。
Those who gesture less are more likely to need intensive early intervention.
那些手势较少的儿童更有可能需要密集的早期干预。
Children with Down’s syndrome may express themselves better when taught to use a mix of gesture and speech rather than speech alone.
唐氏综合症儿童如果被教导混合使用手势和语言，而不是单独使用语言，那么他们可能会更好地表达自己的意思。
Psychotherapists can be trained to look out for gestures hinting that patients are thinking something they are not yet ready to say.
心理治疗师可以接受训练，留意观察患者的一些手势，这些手势表明患者正在想一些他们还没有准备好说出来的事情。
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.
在《王冠》中，戴安娜王妃被警告说，她的双手可能会泄露她的真实情感，这可能是危险的，然后她的双手被绑在一起，这样她就可以学会不做手势地说话。
No one who reads this book could ever again think that gesturing shows only a lack of control.
任何读过这本书的人都不会再认为打手势只是表明一个人缺乏控制力。
It is about thinking and communication, and is a sophisticated aid to both.
手势关乎思考和交流，而且是对这两者的一种复杂精妙的辅助方式。
