The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory

The relationship between language and thought is controversial. One hypothesis is that language fosters habits of processing information that are retained even in non-linguistic domains. In left-branching (LB) languages, modifiers usually precede the head, and real-time sentence comprehension may mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2019-02, Vol.9 (1), p.1124, Article 1124
Main Authors: Amici, Federica, Sánchez-Amaro, Alex, Sebastián-Enesco, Carla, Cacchione, Trix, Allritz, Matthias, Salazar-Bonet, Juan, Rossano, Federico
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/181/19/2472
631/477/2811
Adolescent
Adult
Africa
Asia
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension
Europe
Female
Functional Laterality - physiology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Hypotheses
Information processing
Language
Language thought relationship
Linguistics
Male
Memory
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
multidisciplinary
Native languages
Native speakers
Parsing
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Semantics
Short term memory
Speech Perception
Syntax
Thinking - physiology
Tree structures
Word order
Young Adult
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Summary:The relationship between language and thought is controversial. One hypothesis is that language fosters habits of processing information that are retained even in non-linguistic domains. In left-branching (LB) languages, modifiers usually precede the head, and real-time sentence comprehension may more heavily rely on retaining initial information in working memory. Here we presented a battery of working memory and short-term memory tasks to adult native speakers of four LB and four right-branching (RB) languages from Africa, Asia and Europe. In working memory tasks, LB speakers were better than RB speakers at recalling initial stimuli, but worse at recalling final stimuli. Our results show that the practice of parsing sentences in specific directions due to the syntax and word order of our native language not only predicts the way we remember words, but also other non-linguistic stimuli.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-37654-9