新概念雙語：囧研究：無意義詞匯會(huì)影響消費(fèi)習(xí)慣

Scientists have discovered that some made-up words such as subvick， bollyze and quingel are far more amusing than others. This is because people find nonsense words with uncommon letter combinations more unexpected and humorous than those words with probable sequences of letters.

科學(xué)家發(fā)現(xiàn)諸如subvick， bollyze和quingel之類的混合詞比其他詞匯更加有趣。這是因?yàn)槿藗儼l(fā)現(xiàn)，不常用字母拼成的無意義詞匯比正常詞匯更令人驚喜和引人發(fā)笑。

A study， led by a team from the department of psychology at the University of Alberta， Canada， examined the theory that some nonsense words are funnier than others. The team used a computer programme to generate thousands of random nonsense words.

加拿大阿爾伯塔大學(xué)的心理系團(tuán)隊(duì)進(jìn)行了一項(xiàng)實(shí)驗(yàn)，用于檢查該理論，即無意義詞匯是否比其他詞匯更加引人發(fā)笑。該團(tuán)隊(duì)利用電腦程序生成了上千個(gè)隨意的無意義詞匯。

Any words that sounded the same as real words were removed from the test. Students were asked to compare two non-words and select the option they considered more humorous.

和正常詞匯讀音相同的無意義詞匯會(huì)被刪除。參與實(shí)驗(yàn)的學(xué)生被要求對(duì)比兩個(gè)無意義詞匯，并且選出他們認(rèn)為更引人發(fā)笑的那個(gè)詞。

In the second part， they were shown a single non-word and asked to rate how humorous they found it on a scale from one to 100. Researchers discovered that some words such as blabesoc were indeed funnier than other non-words， like anotain.

對(duì)于另外一部分學(xué)生，工作人員先向他們展示一個(gè)無意義詞匯，然后讓他們?cè)?-100之間選個(gè)數(shù)字來評(píng)定這個(gè)詞的幽默性。

Researchers discovered that some words such as blabesoc were indeed funnier than other non-words， like anotain. Chris Westbury， a psychology professor and lead author of the study， said： ‘The weirder the word is， the funnier the word is.

實(shí)驗(yàn)者發(fā)現(xiàn)，諸如blabesoc這類的無意義詞匯確實(shí)比像anotain這類的無意義詞匯更引人發(fā)笑。心理學(xué)教授克、該實(shí)驗(yàn)的主要發(fā)起人里斯·韋斯特伯里說：“詞匯越奇怪，就越引人發(fā)笑。

The results were released in a paper entitled， Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes： On the Quantification of Humour As Entropy， and published in the Journal of Memory and Language. The findings back up the 19th century theory from German philosopher， Arthur Schopenhauer， who proposed that humour is a result of an expectation violation.

實(shí)驗(yàn)結(jié)果以”講述世界上最不可笑的笑話——關(guān)于幽默做為平均信息量的品質(zhì)“為題，發(fā)表在《記憶與語言雜志》上。這一發(fā)現(xiàn)印證了19世紀(jì)德國哲學(xué)家亞瑟·叔本華的理論，他認(rèn)為幽默就是違背預(yù)期的。

Identifying the funniest words is already a skill of good comedians or comic writers. The paper says： ‘The effect may also have practical effects in product naming， if it can be shown that the computable funniness in a name is a relevant factor in consumer behaviour.

辨別最幽默詞匯已經(jīng)成為優(yōu)秀喜劇演員或喜劇作家的必備技能了。論文中說到：如果能夠證明產(chǎn)品幽默的名稱會(huì)影響到消費(fèi)習(xí)慣，那么這可能會(huì)對(duì)產(chǎn)品命名產(chǎn)生實(shí)際的影響。

We predict that consumers will strongly prefer (funny Non Words) ‘whook’or ‘mamessa’to (unfunny Non Words) ‘turth’or ‘suppect’for a new product name.

我們相信，與諸如‘turth’或者 ‘suppect’這類不可笑的無意義詞匯相比，消費(fèi)者們會(huì)格外青睞‘whook’ 或者 ‘mamessa’這類滑稽的無意義詞匯。