Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and New York University took a closer look not too long ago. Their results shed light on some really fascinating implications for how language structure shapes the brain’s predictive power for sentence processing. The study was limited to Dutch-speaking participants. It showed that their brain processing is quite different from that of English speakers, due to the fascinating grammatical structures within their native language.
The research was led by New York University postdoctoral researcher Cas W. Coopmans. It was originally designed to test the cognitive burden of sentence building for Dutch-speaking immigrants when navigating an interactive audio Dutch-language audiobook. Dutch, a language known for its unique syntax, often places verbs towards the end of sentences, as exemplified by the phrase: “because I a cookie with chocolate ate.” This interdisciplinary re-orientation raised questions about how these typological differences in language structure might influence cognitive processing.
Throughout the experiment, the researchers tracked changes in brain waves of the Dutch participants. Because of this, they discovered that their brains re-wired themselves to the grammatical structure that is implicit within the Dutch language. Andrea E. Martin, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute, noticed that Dutch speakers placed significant emphasis on predictive language processing. This mighty inclination exhibits their extraordinary present for comprehending language. That’s because participants were usually predicting how phrases would end in their heads before they ever said them.
In counterpoint, past research with English‐dominant speakers has indicated a more circumstantial “wait and see” response to language processing. Coopmans explained this divergence, stating, “And that’s probably unrealistically late; you’re probably much more predictive in processing.” This underscores the radically different cognitive strategies used by speakers of different languages.
Jixing Li, a cognitive linguist at City University Hong Kong, stressed the need to include linguistic diversity within cognitive models. He stated, “Linguistic models should incorporate more diversity to provide a realistic picture of human language-based thinking.” Martin’s findings provide additional confirmation of this claim. They still demonstrate that distinct areas of the brain light up when people read English sentences versus Chinese sentences.
The study’s results indicate that the human brain re-calibrates the way it processes information based on key grammatical distinctions between languages. As Martin elaborated, “This is going to help us capture how the brain is understanding the structured meaning of language and the social utility of language in many different ways.”
The researchers maintain that these findings bring to focus how urgently the scientific community should work towards building more inclusive linguistic models. Such models should account for the myriad of ways in which different cultures understand and utilize language.
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