{"id":204248,"date":"2025-01-22T01:30:35","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T07:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/building-sentence-structure-may-be-language-specific-brain-activity-study-finds"},"modified":"2025-01-22T01:30:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T07:30:35","slug":"building-sentence-structure-may-be-language-specific-brain-activity-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/building-sentence-structure-may-be-language-specific-brain-activity-study-finds","title":{"rendered":"Building sentence structure may be language-specific, brain activity study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published<\/a> in PLOS Biology<\/i>, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute and Radboud University in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based on a strategy for predicting what comes next rather than a \u201cwait-and-see\u201d approach, showing that strategies may differ across languages.<\/p>\n

While listening to spoken language<\/a>, people need to link abstract knowledge of grammar to the words they actually hear. Theories on how people build grammatical structure in real time are often based on English. In sentences such as \u201cI have watched a documentary,\u201d the noun \u201cdocumentary\u201d immediately follows the verb. However, in Dutch sentences, the word order<\/a> may be reversed: \u201cIk heb een documentaire gezien\u201d (\u201cI have a documentary watched.\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cTo find out whether speakers of different languages build grammatical structure in the same way, it is important to look at languages that differ from English in such interesting respects,\u201d says first author Cas Coopmans. \u201cFindings based on English may not generalize to languages that have different grammatical properties, such as Dutch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute and Radboud University in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}