• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Pedants, The Feeling Is Real. Hearing Bad Grammar Can Physically Stress You Out

November 1, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

For those who find themselves wincing whenever they hear a “could of” instead of a “could have”, or a “less” when it should be “fewer”, it may not just be a passing annoyance. A new study has revealed that our bodies can show physical signs of stress upon hearing grammatical violations.

As Dagmar Divjak, principal investigator of the study, explained in a statement, the relationship between language cognition and physiological responses has previously been explored in the form of studying brain activity and eye tracking, “but the relation between language cognition and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has so far received less attention.” 

Advertisement

It’s the ANS that controls our heart rate, so the researchers looked to measure the heart rate variability (HRV) of people listening to incorrect grammar to find out more about the cognition-physiology relationship. As it tells us the length of time between successive heartbeats, HRV can be a useful indicator of stress – those intervals between beats tend to be a more regular duration when someone is stressed, versus more variable when relaxed.

With a heart rate sensor attached to their middle fingers, 41 British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples. Half of these contained grammatical errors in the form of articles, such as adding an “a/an” where it was not required or omitting a “the” when it was.

The results showed that there was a statistically significant reduction in HRV in response to incorrect grammar, to the point where the more errors a person heard, the more regular their heartbeat – and the higher their stress levels – became.

“The results of this study bring into focus a new dimension of the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition… Our findings show that [the ANS], too, responds to cognitive demands, and this suggests that cognitive effort reverberates through the physiological system in more ways than previously thought,” said Divjak.

Advertisement

The researchers also believe that the results demonstrate that HRV could be used as an indicator of someone’s implicit linguistic knowledge; this is the knowledge of a language, often our first, that we pick up without really thinking about it. If someone’s heartbeat suggests they’re stressed out by poor grammar, it might also indicate that they know the language well. But why does knowing about this matter?

“[A]ccurately assessing someone’s linguistic abilities, regardless of age and physical or cognitive abilities, is important for many questions pertaining to core areas of life relating to cognition, including brain health,” explained Divjak.

“This study provides us with a new method for tapping into aspects of cognition that are not directly observable. This is particularly valuable in work with language users who are unable to verbally express their opinion due to young or old age, or ill health.”

The study is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – Liverpool’s Klopp says Van Dijk fit, Keita fine after return to club
  2. Buy now, pay later plans not shrinking credit card loans, says TransUnion
  3. Abu Dhabi’s Etihad seeks to hire up to 1,000 cabin crew
  4. New Record Set With 17 People In Earth Orbit At The Same Time

Source Link: Pedants, The Feeling Is Real. Hearing Bad Grammar Can Physically Stress You Out

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • This Pill Is Actually A Tiny Printer That Repairs Internal Injuries Using Biocompatible Ink
  • “This Is Amazing”: Scientists Have Found Evidence Of A Long-Lost World Deep Within The Earth
  • From The Shiniest World To Lava And Eternal Darkness, These Are The Weirdest Known Planets
  • Do Sharks Have Bones?
  • The Zombie Awakens: A Volcano Is Showing “First Signs” Of Unrest After 700,000 Years Of Quiet
  • Two Of The World’s Biggest Earthquakes Seem To Be Synched Together
  • California Has A New State Snake, And It’s A 1.6-Meter-Long Giant
  • Experimental Nanoparticle “Super-Vaccines” Stop Breast, Pancreatic, And Skin Cancers In Their Tracks
  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version