British researchers have revealed how the body goes into ‘stress mode’ when it hears grammatical mistakes.
- Hearing grammatical errors caused the heart rates of study participants to become regular.
- This physical sign means they were stressed.
- “This observation highlights a new dimension of the complex link between physiology and cognition,” according to the authors.
Hearing grammatical errors causes physical signs of stress, according to a scientist from the University of Birmingham (England). To reach this conclusion, they carried out a study published in the journal Journal of Neurolinguistics.
“Accurately assessing a person’s language abilities is important for brain health”
“Your knowledge of your native language is largely implicit, that is, learning your native language does not require you to sit down and study, and using it does not require much thought, or even None. It is difficult to determine exactly what is right or wrong in a sentence and, even worse, to explain why it is so, especially if you have not had formal language training. However, accurately assessing the A person’s language abilities, regardless of age and physical or cognitive abilities, is important for many questions relating to essential areas of life related to cognition, including brain health. has explained Dagmar Divjakwho supervised the work.
As part of the research, the team recruited 41 healthy adults. In one experiment, participants listened to 40 excerpts of English speech, half of which contained grammatical errors. While listening, their heart rate variability was assessed. This is a cardiovascular measure indexing autonomic nervous system activity, which can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. In detail, heart rate variability measures the time that elapses between two successive heartbeats. The length of intervals between a person’s successive heartbeats tends to vary when they are relaxed, but becomes more regular when they are stressed.
A regular heartbeat is a sign of stress
The authors observed a statistically significant reduction in heart rate variability in response to grammatical errors. This decrease reflects the extent of grammatical errors. This suggests that the more errors a person hears, the more regular their heartbeat becomes, which is a sign of stress.
“This observation highlights a new dimension of the complex link between physiology and cognition. Being able to use a portable, non-intrusive technique with linguistic stimuli also creates exciting possibilities for assessing the linguistic knowledge of individuals from diverse populations in their natural environment and in authentic communication situations”, can we read in the conclusions of the work.
