Reading and writing direction causes spatial biases in mental model construction in language understanding

Reading and writing direction causes spatial biases in mental model construction in language understanding Antonio Roman (reche@ugr.es) Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Spain Andrea Flumini (andrea.flumini2@unibo.it) Dept. of Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy Marysol Escobar (marysol_puig13@hotmail.com) Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico Julio Santiago (santiago@ugr.es) Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Spain Abstract model that represents the spatial position of those three objects. However, the input leaves unspecified many aspects of the situation, which the comprehender must infer. For example, two different spatial arrangements of the three objects are consistent with the sentence above: the lamp may be located to the left of the table or to its right (the TV would be at the opposite side). Jahn, Knauff, and Johnson-Laird (2007) observed that the preferred initial model for such a description aligns the three mentioned objects horizontally in left-to-right (L–R) order. They suggested that this preference for L–R models was a bias induced by the habitual reading and writing direction (RWD) of their German participants. As Jahn et al (2007) showed, such biases are not inconsequential: the spatial arrangement of the objects in the model helps solving some kinds of problems and hinders others. Roman, El Fathi, and Santiago (2013) confirmed the suggestion by Jahn et al (2007) that such spatial biases correlate with habitual RWD. They tested Spanish and Moroccan participants on a task that consisted in drawing auditorily presented sentences describing static scenes such as the table is between the lamp and the TV”. Spanish participants preferred to draw the lamp on the left and the TV on the right, whereas Moroccan participants (who read and write in Arabic, a R-L script) tended to draw the lamp on the right and the TV on the left. These results add to a wide, though dispersed, literature that shows that habitual RWD correlates with lateral biases in a variety of mental processes and representations, including low level perceptual and attentional skills (Andrews, Aisenberg, d'Avossa, & Sapir, 2013; Maass, Pagani, & Berta, 2007; Mishkin & Forgays, 1952; Pollatsek, Bolozky, Well, & Rayner, 1981; Smith & Elias, 2013; Spalek & Hammad, 2005), visual exploration (Chokron & Imbert, 1993; Kugelmass & Lieblich, 1970), motion preferences in drawing (Kebbe & Vinter, 2012; Nachshon, 1985; Shanon, 1979) and kissing (Shaki, 2012), item choice from a list (Ariel, Al-Harthy, Was, & Dunlosky, 2011), aesthetic preferences (Chokron & De Is the direction of the script able to cause spatial biases in the mental models that understanders build when listening to language? In order to answer this question, we manipulated experimentally the experience of reading a script with different directionalities. Spanish monolinguals read either normal (left-to-right), mirror reversed (right-to-left), rotated downward (up-down), or rotated upward (down-up) text, and then drew the contents of auditory descriptions such as “the square is between the cross and the triangle”. The directionality of the drawings showed that a brief reading experience is enough to cause congruent and very specific spatial biases in mental model construction. However, there were limits to this flexibility: there was a strong overall preference to arrange the models along the horizontal dimension. Keywords: Reading and writing direction; Spatial bias; Mental model; Cognitive flexibility; Working memory; Language comprehension. Can arbitrary and irrelevant aspects of the code that conveys a message, such as its directionality, modulate the mental representation of the contents of the message? In this paper we show that they do. It is now a standard assumption in the psychology of language comprehension that the final representation achieved by comprehenders is a mental model of the described situation (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Van Dijk, & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998, for a review). Mental models are working memory representations about the world. They are analogical, spatial, and populated by concrete content, although they can also represent abstract content (Goodwin & Johnson-Laird, 2005; Santiago, Roman, & Ouellet, 2011). Once set up, mental models can be “run” in working memory, allowing us to anticipate consequences, reason, solve problems, and plan actions. Language provides instructions that guide mental model construction in the comprehender (Johnson-Laird, 1983). From a description such as “the table is between the lamp and the TV,” the listener can construct a mental