奇速英语

手势语作用强大，你会使用吗？

Politicians use gestures to strengthen the delivery of speeches, while many people shrug or move their hands wildly to make a point. Now, scientists have shown that making gestures while talking is part of language and affects how the meaning of words is interpreted.

Researchers believe that gestures form part of a communication system deeply rooted in humans, which allow us to be understood. This might explain why many of us gesture while talking on the phone, where our actions can’t be seen.

Researchers think it’s because gestures and words “very probably” form a single communication system, which serves to promote expression and help us to make ourselves understood. “In human communication, voice is not sufficient: even hand movements are involved, as are facial expressions,” they said.

Researchers also studied prosody, which is what makes a sentence understood in a specific way and usually relies on intonation and the rhythm of language. For example, without prosody, nothing would distinguish the spoken statement “this is an apple” from the “this is an apple?”

In an experiment, the researchers asked 20 Italian speakers to listen to various sentences with confusing meanings and watch videos of people saying the sentences. In the videos, the sentences could be “matched” – when gestures corresponded to the meaning of the spoken words – or ‘mismatched’ when the gestures matched a different meaning. They found that in the matched conditions there was no improvement due to gestures. The participants’ performance was very good both in the video and in the audio only sessions.’

They said that it is in the mismatched experiment that the effect of hand gestures became clear. “With the mismatched sentences, the subjects were much more likely to make the wrong choice - that is, they’d choose the meaning indicated in the gestures rather than in the speech. This means that gestures affect how meaning is interpreted and we believe this shows the existence of a common cognitive system for gestures, intonation and rhythm of spoken language.”