囧研究：無意義詞彙 影響消費習慣？

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.
科學家發現諸如subvick, bollyze和quingel之類的混合詞比其他詞彙更加有趣。這是因爲人們發現，不常用字母拼成的無意義詞彙比正常詞彙更令人驚喜和引人發笑。

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的心理系團隊進行了一項實驗，用於檢查該理論，即無意義詞彙是否比其他詞彙更加引人發笑。該團隊利用電腦程序生成了上千個隨意的無意義詞彙。

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.
和正常詞彙讀音相同的無意義詞彙會被刪除。參與實驗的學生被要求對比兩個無意義詞彙，並且選出他們認爲更引人發笑的那個詞。

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.
對於另外一部分學生，工作人員先向他們展示一個無意義詞彙，然後讓他們在1-100之間選個數字來評定這個詞的幽默性。

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.
實驗者發現，諸如blabesoc這類的無意義詞彙確實比像anotain這類的無意義詞彙更引人發笑。心理學教授克、該實驗的主要發起人里斯·韋斯特伯裏說：“詞彙越奇怪，就越引人發笑。

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.
實驗結果以”講述世界上最不可笑的笑話——關於幽默做爲平均信息量的品質“爲題，發表在《記憶與語言雜誌》上。這一發現印證了19世紀德國哲學家亞瑟·叔本華的理論，他認爲幽默就是違背預期的。

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.
辨別最幽默詞彙已經成爲優秀喜劇演員或喜劇作家的必備技能了。論文中說到：如果能夠證明產品幽默的名稱會影響到消費習慣，那麼這可能會對產品命名產生實際的影響。

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彙相比，消費者們會格外青睞‘whook’ 或者 ‘mamessa’這類滑稽的無意義詞彙。