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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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Autores principales: Amici, Federica, Sánchez-Amaro, Alex, Sebastián-Enesco, Carla, Cacchione, Trix, Allritz, Matthias, Salazar-Bonet, Juan, Rossano, Federico
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30718704
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37654-9
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author Amici, Federica
Sánchez-Amaro, Alex
Sebastián-Enesco, Carla
Cacchione, Trix
Allritz, Matthias
Salazar-Bonet, Juan
Rossano, Federico
author_facet Amici, Federica
Sánchez-Amaro, Alex
Sebastián-Enesco, Carla
Cacchione, Trix
Allritz, Matthias
Salazar-Bonet, Juan
Rossano, Federico
author_sort Amici, Federica
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-63622902019-02-07 The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory Amici, Federica Sánchez-Amaro, Alex Sebastián-Enesco, Carla Cacchione, Trix Allritz, Matthias Salazar-Bonet, Juan Rossano, Federico Sci Rep Article 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. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-02-04 /pmc/articles/PMC6362290/ /pubmed/30718704 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37654-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Amici, Federica
Sánchez-Amaro, Alex
Sebastián-Enesco, Carla
Cacchione, Trix
Allritz, Matthias
Salazar-Bonet, Juan
Rossano, Federico
The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title_full The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title_fullStr The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title_full_unstemmed The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title_short The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
title_sort word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362290/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30718704
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37654-9
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