手势可以帮我们更好的记住单词

Communicating by voice alone has its drawbacks, though.For example, I can’t use hand gestures to clarify what I mean. And, as it turns out, that makes a big difference. Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand wanted to know how much a relevant hand gesture helps to communicate an idea. They had volunteers watch video clips of a woman saying different simple phrases, such as “the square box,” or “peel the banana.”

光靠说话来沟通有它的缺点。比如，我不能用手势来阐明我的意思。而这，结果证明，（对沟通）影响很大。新西兰奥塔戈大学的调查者们想弄清楚一个相关的手势能在多大程度上帮助人们沟通自己的观点。他们让志愿者们看几段视频，视频中是一名女性在说不同的简单短语，比如“方盒子”，“剥香蕉皮”。

In some, she simply said the phrase without moving her hands. Peel the banana. In others, she made the kind of hand gesture most of us would make when saying that–a sort of banana-peeling mime that matches the content of the phrase. In a third group, she made gestures with her hands that were unrelated to what she was saying.

有的视频中，她只是说出来而没有做手势。剥香蕉。有的视频中，她做了手势，而且是当说那个短语时，我们大多数人都会做的那类手势-如同在表演符合剥香蕉过程的哑剧。还有的视频中，她做了与她所说内容无关的手势。

The results? People who got the matching content hand gestures remembered those phrases more effectively than folks who got just the words alone. And folks who got just the words alone did better than folks who got irrelevant hand gestures!

结果呢？看到和所说内容相关的手势的人比那些只听到说话声音的人能更高效地记住了那些短语。而只听到声音的人比那些看到了和说话内容无关的手势的人（在短语记忆方面）做得更好。

What does this show us? We already knew that all the hand-waving we do when we speak isn’t just nervous energy; it serves various functions. Apparently, one of them is to help the listener remember what you’ve said.

这向我们说明了什么呢？我们已经知道，我们说话时挥动双手不仅仅是神经能量的作用：这有各种功能。显然，其中的一项功能便是能够帮助听话人记住你所说的话。

 Notes:
drawback:缺点
peel:剥，削
matching:对应的
irrelevant:不相关的