Gaby
Does improper word usage and punctuation drive you crazy? Relax: you’re not alone.
Linguists at the University of Birmingham in the UK were the first to study the negative reactions other people’s grammatical mistakes can trigger. They found those physical reactions show up in the sympathetic nervous system — the part that controls the “fight-or-flight” response.
The researchers found a direct link between poor grammar and heart rate variability (HRV), which measures changes in the intervals between heartbeats. Those intervals are regulated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, digestion, and other vital functions.
According to the Daily Mail, intervals between heartbeats typically vary. Those intervals become more regular when a person is under stress. In the study, the stressors were textual errors such as incorrect verb tense, poor sentence structure, confusion between singular and plural forms, double negatives, and misplaced commas.
What the Researchers Discovered
For the study, the team recruited 41 healthy adult English-speaking Britons aged 18 to 44. None of the participants reported learning disabilities or any heart-related issues.
The volunteers listened to 40 short text samples. Half of the samples contained grammatical errors. The length of the excerpts varied, as did the number of mistakes in each. While the participants listened, the researchers continuously monitored their cardiovascular activity. Afterward, the volunteers answered questions evaluating the texts.
They measured signs of stress alongside the cardiovascular data.
Dagmar Divjak, a professor who researches cognitive linguistics and language cognition, said the autonomic nervous system responded to the participants’ cognitive demands.
In a paper in the journal Neurolinguistics, the team wrote that deviations from linguistic norms triggered a “clear cardiovascular response.” They added that “this observation revealed a new dimension of the complex relationships between physiology and cognition,” suggesting that “cognitive efforts affect the physiological system more than previously thought.”
