Writing Direction Influences Spatial Cognition

Writing Direction Influences Spatial Cognition Ting Ting Chan (tingc@hawaii.edu) Benjamin Bergen (bergen@hawaii.edu) Dept of Linguistics, 569 Moore Hall, 1890 East-West Hall Honolulu, HI 96822 writing system orientation influence our spatial representations of sequences of events? Some evidence suggests that writing system orientation may influence other aspects of cognition. For example, in speakers of some European languages, the mental representation of numerical magnitude is related to the left- right axis. Large numbers preferentially elicit rightwards responses, and small numbers leftward responses (the SNARC effect - Dehaene, et al. 1993). But when French speakers (French is written from left to right) are compared with Iranian speakers (who write from right to left), only French speakers but not Iranian speakers display the SNARC effect (Dehaene, et al. 1993). This suggests a significant relation between the mental number line and writing direction. Similar effects have been found for non- numerical ordinal information, which appears to also be spatially coded (Gevers et al. 2003). Other evidence for relativistic effects of writing system direction is found in a study by Maas and Russo (2003), showing that in relating language about two-participant events to pictures, Italians (whose writing system runs from left to right) tend to place the agent on the left of the patient, while Arabic speaking participants (whose system goes from right to left) place the agent on the right of the patient. The hypothesis that writings system direction can influence more general aspects of cognition is called into question by work by Tversky et al. (1991), who examined the relationship between the direction of different writing systems and people’s mental representation of temporal, spatial, quantitative and preference relations in English, Hebrew and Arabic speakers. Their subjects were asked to perform a sticker-placing task under various conditions and their responses were deemed to reflect spatial representations of time, quantity, and preference. The results showed a significant influence of writing system direction on spatial representation of temporal concepts, but not on the quantity or preference. An even stronger argument against possible relativism caused by different orientations of writing systems is put forward by Chatterjee et al. (1999), who claim that normal right-handed subjects tend to process information from their left to their right hand side due not to their writing system but to the differential properties of right- and left- hemisphere possessing. They argue that the left cerebral hemisphere, where language is predominantly processed by right-handers, selectively directs attention with a left to right vector. So, normal right-handed subjects tend to pay attention to the left side of their visual field, which may influence their expectations about where events start (Chatterjee 2001). They further argue that this may lead to a similar preference for left to right actions, as well. Abstract The world's languages make use of different writing system orientations, running from left to right, from right to left, or from top to bottom. Interacting with writing systems is an important component of how literate humans gain and convey information, and as such the spatial routines we engage in while reading and writing may well have an impact on the spatial organization of other cognitive functions, like memory, visual attention, expectations about the orientations of processes, and so on. Three experiments tested for effects of writing system orientation on spatial cognition, using literate speakers of English, Mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese. The first experiment addressed memory for information in different parts of the visual field; the second, the differences in visual attention; and the third, the arrangement of sequential events in space. The results suggest that the orientation of a writing system is engrained in speakers' perceptual and motor routines to the point that it surfaces when they perform these other spatial tasks. More generally, the findings reported here support the idea that idiosyncratic characteristics of particular languages can influence general cognition. Keywords: writing systems, relativity, attention, memory, sentence production, vision Introduction We live in a world replete with information, and for many literate people, reading and writing is one of the main channels by which it is accessed and conveyed. Writing systems vary across languages, in particular through the direction in which the text is written. While English runs from left to right, Japanese goes from top to bottom, and Arabic unrolls from right to left. Knowing how to read and write a particular language thus entails mastery of perceptual and motor routines whose spatial characteristics are determined by the conventional orientation of the writing system. (‘Orientation’ and ‘direction’ are used interchangeably in this paper to denote the systematic spatial organization of a written language.) To write in English, one starts on the left and moves rightward, while performing the same task in Arabic entails the reverse action. Similarly, reading in the two languages requires readers to begin collecting visual information in different parts of the visual field. But does the conventional orientation of written systems affect how people interact with and think about space beyond language? For example, do different writing systems influence where in the visual field we tend to focus first for non-linguistic information? Do they influence how we package information about the world? Do differences in