WASHINGTON, May 14 (Xinhua) -- A study published on Monday in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that speakers' slow-down effects as they hesitate or make brief pauses with sounds like "uh" happened mostly before nouns.
A team of researchers led by Frank Seifart from the University of Amsterdam and Balthasar Bickel from the University of Zurich looked at thousands of recordings of spontaneous speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world, including the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Himalayas and the Kalahari Desert.
When people speak, they unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others, and sometimes make brief pauses or throw in meaningless sounds like "uhm". Researchers suggested that such slow-down effects provided key evidence on how our brains process language.
In these recordings, the researchers looked at slow-down effects before nouns (like "friend") and verbs (like "come") and they measured the speed of utterance in sounds per second and noted whether speakers made short pauses.
"We discovered that in this diverse sample of languages, there is a robust tendency for slow-down effects before nouns as compared to verbs," said Bickel. "The reason is that nouns are more difficult to plan because they're usually only used when they represent new information."
According to the researchers, they are otherwise replaced with pronouns (e.g., "she") or omitted, as in the following example: "My friend came back. She (my friend) took a seat." But no such replacement principles apply to verbs: they are generally used regardless of whether they represent new or old information.
The findings also shed new light on long-standing puzzles in linguistics. For example, the findings suggest universal long-term effects on how grammar evolves over time: The slow-down effects before nouns make it more difficult for nouns to develop complex forms through contraction with words that precede them.
In German, for example, prefixes are far more common in verbs like "ent-kommen" and "ver-kommen" than in nouns, according to the study.
At a more general level, the study has contributed to a deeper understanding of how languages work in their natural environment, according to the researchers.
