文/埃德·扬 译/蒋威

By Ed Yong

The Incredible Thing We Do During Conversations交谈的神奇之处

文/埃德·扬 译/蒋威

ByEd Yong

When we take turns1speaking, we chime in2after a culturally universal short gap. 轮流讲话时，一方语毕，我们会稍作停顿再插话，这是人类文化中的一个普遍现象。

One of the greatest human skills becomes evident during conversations. It’s there, not in what we say but in what we don’t. It’s there in the pauses, the silences, the gaps between the end of my words and the start of yours.

[2] When we talk we take turns,where the “right” to speak flips3flip翻动。back and forth between partners. This conversational pitter-patter4pitter-patter噼里啪哒的声音。is so familiar and seemingly unremarkable that we rarely remark on5remark on评论，议论，谈论。it. But consider the timing: On average, each turn lasts for around 2 seconds, and the typical gap between them is just 200 milliseconds—barely enough time to utter a syllable6syllable音节。. That figure is nighuniversal7nigh-universal近乎普遍的。. It exists across cultures, with only slight variations. It’s even there in sign-language8sign-language手语。conversations.

人类最伟大的技能之一在交谈时变得显而易见。但这项技能并非体现在言语中，而是在言语外。它体现在交谈时的停顿和沉默里，在你一言我一语的间歇中。

[2]我们在交谈时会轮流讲话，“发言权”在彼此间来回翻转。这种谈话节奏是如此司空见惯，看似毫不起眼，以至于我们鲜有谈及。但细想一下讲话时机：平均来说，每轮讲话大概持续2秒钟，两轮讲话之间的间隔一般只有200毫秒——几乎不够发一个音节。但这一时间间隔近乎普遍存在，不同文化间仅略有差异，甚至在手语交流中都是如此。

1 take turns依次，轮流（说、做等）。

2 chime in插话。

[3] “It’s the minimum human response time to anything,” says Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics9马克斯·普朗克心理语言学研究所，隶属于马克斯·普朗克科学促进学会。该促进学会是德国的一个大型科研学术组织，也是国际上规模最大、威望最高和成效最大的由政府资助的自治科学组织，下设83个研究所。. It’s the time that runners take to respond to a starting pistol10starting pistol发令枪。—and that’s just a simple signal. If you gave them a two-way11two-way双向的。choice—say, run on green but stay on red—they’d take longer to pick the right response. Conversations have a far greater number of possible responses,which ought to saddle us with12saddle with使负重担，使承担任务或责任。lengthy gaps between turns. Those don’t exist because we build our responses during our partner’s turn. We listen to their words while simultaneously13simultaneously同时发生地。crafting14craft精心制作。our own, so that when our opportunity comes, we seize it as quickly as it’s physically possible to.

[4] “When you take into account the complexity of what’s going into these short turns, you start to realize that this is an elite behavior,” says Levinson.“Dolphins can swim amazingly fast,and eagles can fly as high as a jet, but this is our trick.”

[3]马克斯·普朗克心理语言学研究所的斯蒂芬·莱文森说：“这是人类对任何事物作出反应所需的最短时间。”这也是跑步运动员听到发令枪后作出反应所需的时间，而枪声只是一个简单的信号。如果给运动员一个双向选择——譬如说，看到绿色信号便起跑，红色则不动——那么，他们需要更长的时间来作出正确反应。交谈中可能引起的反应数量远超于此，本应导致接话时间漫长无比。这种情况之所以没有出现，是因为我们在对方说话时便开始思考应答内容。我们一边听对方讲话，一边构思自己的答复。轮到我们讲话时，我们便迅速接话，要多快有多快。

[4]“考虑到快速接话的复杂性，你就会意识到这是一种精英行为。”莱文森说，“海豚游速之快，令人叹为观止；老鹰飞行之高，堪比飞机；但快速接话是我们人类的绝活儿。”

[5] Conversation analysts first started noticing the rapid-fire15rapid-fire（对话或演讲）语速极快的，连珠炮似的。nature of spoken turns in the 1970s, but had neither interest in quantifying those gaps nor the tools to do so. Levinson had both. A few years ago, his team began recording videos of people casually talking in informal settings. “I went to people who were sitting outside on the patio16patio（连接房屋并铺有地面的）露台。and asked if it was okay to set up a video camera for a study,” says Tanya Stivers.

[6] While she recorded Americans,her colleagues did the same around the world, for speakers of Italian, Dutch,Danish, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Yélî-Dnye (from Papua New Guinea),and Tzeltal (a Mayan language from Mexico). Despite the vastly different grammars of these eight tongues, and the equally vast cultural variations between their speakers, the researchers found more similarities than differences.

[7] The typical gap was 200 milliseconds long, rising to 470 for the Danish speakers and falling to just 7 for the Japanese. So, yes, there’s some variation, but it’s pretty minuscule17minuscule极小的。,especially when compared to cultural stereotypes18stereotype模式化形象，成见。. There are plenty of anecdotal19anecdotal轶闻的。reports of minute-long pauses in Scandinavian chat, and virtually simultaneous speech among New York Jews and Antiguan villagers. But Stivers and her colleagues saw none of that.

[5] 20世纪70年代，会话分析人员首次注意到人类接话的快速性，但对于测量其时长既无兴趣，也没有工具。莱文森两者俱备。几年前，他的团队开始用视频记录人们在非正式场合下的闲谈。“看到有人坐在露台上闲聊，我便走过去问他们，能否将其谈话用视频录下来用于研究。”塔尼娅·斯蒂弗斯说。

[6]在塔尼娅·斯蒂弗斯记录美国人谈话的同时，她的同事也在世界各地做着同样的事情，记录用意大利语、荷兰语、丹麦语、日语、韩语、老挝语、耶里多涅语（巴布亚新几内亚的一种语言）和泽尔塔尔语（墨西哥的一种玛雅语）所作的交谈。尽管这8种语言的语法截然不同，说这些语言的人在文化上也存在巨大差异，但研究人员发现，相似性大于差异性。

[7]不同语言的接话时间一般为200毫秒，时间最长的是丹麦语，长达470毫秒，最短的则是日语，只有7毫秒。因此，的确存在一些差异，但这种差异却是微乎其微的，尤其是与文化上的刻板印象作对比时。诸多传闻称，斯堪的纳维亚人的接话时间可以分钟计算，而纽约的犹太人和安提瓜的乡下人聊天时则几乎在同时讲话。但这些情况，斯蒂弗斯及其同事都没有看到。

[8] Instead, they uncovered what Levinson describes as a “basic metabolism20metabolism新陈代谢。of human social life”—a universal tendency to minimize21minimize减到最低数量，降到最低程度。the silence between turns, without overlaps.(Overlaps only happened in 17 percent of turns, typically lasted for just 100 milliseconds, and were mostly slight misfires22misfire（计划等的）未奏效，失败。where one speaker unexpectedly drew out23draw out拉出；使出来。their last syllable.)

[9] The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve24retrieve（从电脑中）读取（信息）。a single word from memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from grammatical cues to changes in pitch25pitch音调。.We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain, while similarly building our hypothetical rejoinder26rejoinder（机智的）应答，（尖锐的）反驳。,all using largely overlapping neural circuits.

[8]相反，他们发现了一种莱文森称之为“人类社会生活的基本代谢”的现象，即人类普遍倾向于尽量缩短接话时间而又不至于造成抢话。（接话时发生抢话的概率只有17%，其持续时间通常只有100毫秒，并且大多数情况下是由细小失误造成的，即说话者最后一个音节是突然冒出的。）

[9]考虑到我们至少需要600毫秒才能从记忆中提取一个单词，并确实做好说出它的准备，接话时间能够如此短暂便越发令人吃惊了。若是短句，其处理时间则长达1500毫秒。这就意味着，在对方讲话时，我们就得利用其话语中的语法提示、音调变化等方方面面的线索来设计自己的回复。我们不断地对一个句子的剩余内容作出预测，同时使用类似方法对自己的回答进行假设。这一过程中使用的神经回路基本上是重叠的。

[10] “It’s amazing, like juggling27juggle玩抛接杂耍。with one hand,” says Levinson. “It’s been completely ignored by the cognitive sciences28cognitive science认知科学。because traditionally, people who studied language comprehension were different to the ones who studied language production. They never stopped to think that, in conversations, these things are happening at the same time.”

[11] Pessimists among us might view this as the ultimate indictment29indictment控诉；谴责。of conversation, a sign that we’re spending most of our “listening” time actually prepping30prep预备；准备。what we are going to say. (As Chuck Pahlaniuk31恰克·帕拉尼克，美国小说家和自由记者。代表作小说《搏击俱乐部》（Fight Club，1996），这部小说获得了各种奖项，并在后来被美国导演大卫·芬奇拍成电影。once wrote, “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”) But really, this work shows that even the most chronic32chronic积习难改的。interruptor is really listening. “Everything points to what astute33astute精明的。observers we are of every word choice, every phonetic34phonetic语音的。change,” says Stivers.

[10]“这相当了不起，就像单手玩杂耍一样。”莱文森说，“但这一过程被认知科学完全忽略了，因为传统上，研究语言理解的人不同于研究语言生成的人。前者从未驻足思考过，在交谈中，这些事情是同时发生的。”

[11]悲观主义者可能将这一过程视为对人类交谈机制的终极谴责，认为这意味着我们实际上将大部分用于“听”的时间用在准备“说”上了。（正如恰克·帕拉尼克曾经写道：“我们之所以会询问他人周末过得如何，唯一的原因是，我们可以告诉对方自己的周末过得怎么样。”）但实际上这项研究表明，即使最喜欢插话的人事实上也在聆听。“所有研究结果都表明，在交谈中，我们可谓明察秋毫，对方的每个用词，每个语音的变化，都逃不过我们的耳朵。”斯蒂弗斯说。

[12] And of course, we can change the length of the gaps when we need to.“You don’t want to respond as fast as possible to everything,” says Stivers,now at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If I ask someone to go to a movie with me and they rapidly say no,that doesn’t feel nice. It’s better to have a gap before you turn someone down for something. And if you hesitate, I can say, ‘...or not tonight?’ We’re pretty good at adjusting.”

[13] Levinson now wants to understand how our turn-taking system evolved. It certainly seems to predate35predate（日期上）早于，先于。language. Great apes36great ape类人猿。like chimps37chimp黑猩猩。take turns when gesturing to each other and other primates38primate灵长目动物。, including several monkeys and one species of lemur39lemur狐猴。, take turns when calling. One team of researchers recently showed that pairs of common marmosets40marmoset狨猴。leave predictable gaps of 5 to 6 seconds between turns, and will match a partner’s rhythm if it speeds up or slows down. These simian41simian猴的；类人猿的。see-saws42see-saw跷跷板。could be independent innovations, or they could reflect an ancient framework that we humans built upon43build upon指望；依赖。when we evolved the capacity for speech.

[14] The researchers also want to understand how turn-taking develops

[12]当然，我们也可以根据需要调整接话速度。“不是所有事情你都想尽快作出回复。”目前受聘于加州大学洛杉矶分校的斯蒂弗斯说，“假如我邀请某人跟我一起看电影，而对方立马就表示拒绝，这会让人很不舒服。在拒绝别人之前最好停顿一下。如果对方犹豫，我可以说：‘……要不改天？’我们人类很善于随机应变。”

[13]莱文森现在想要弄清楚，人类这种轮流讲话的体系是如何进化形成的。这种体系看起来肯定先于语言而存在。黑猩猩等类人猿在交流时会轮流对彼此打手势，其他灵长目动物，包括几种猴子和一种狐猴，在呼唤同类时也是轮流打招呼。一个研究小组最近发现，成对普通狨猴的交流间隔为5到6秒钟，而且如果一方加快或减慢节奏，另一方还会作出相应调整。猿猴这种你来我往的交流方式可能是独创，也可能反映了一种古老的交流体系，而我们人类的语言能力就是在该体系上进化而来的。

[14]研究人员还想知道，轮流讲话这项技能在我们一生中是如何演变的。截至目前，已有研究表明，连6个月大的

〔〕

〔〕throughout our lives. So far, studies have shown that even six-month-old infants respond to their parents very quickly, albeit with more overlaps. At nine months, when they start to grasp that they’re actually communicating with another mind, they slow down.After that, it takes a surprisingly long time to get back to adult speeds. Stivers has found that even 8-year-olds, who have been speaking for many years, are still a few hundred milliseconds slower than adults. “That’s a puzzle that I don’t have answer to,” she says.

婴儿都能快速对父母的言语作出反应，尽管存在较多重叠现象。9个月大时，当这些婴儿开始意识到他们实际上是在与另一个人进行沟通时，他们便会减慢反应速度。自此以后，他们需要很长一段时间才能恢复至成人的速度。斯蒂弗斯发现，即便是已经说话很多年的8岁小孩，他们的接话速度也比成人慢数百毫秒。“这是一个我无法解答的谜团。”她说。

（译者曾获第五届“《英语世界》杯”翻译大赛二等奖）