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I read a study some time ago which was examining the cognitive load required by humans to parse various natural languages. I cannot find any references to it at
by morganpyne 15y ago
I read a study some time ago which was examining the cognitive load required by humans to parse various natural languages. I cannot find any references to it at the moment, but the gist of it was that the grammatical structure of some lanuguages required the speaker/listener to keep more information in their working memory before the meaning could be extracted from the sentence (e.g. all the verbs at the end of the sentence). In computer analogies, think of it as being required to push the whole sentence onto a large stack which then needed to be completely popped before meaning was extracted, instead of pushing and popping in pieces as some natural language grammars allow.
This article thus had me wondering whether people who are raised speaking such languages natively have an inherent advantage in life because they are exercising their working memory earlier on and thus increasing it's capacity, which appears to convey more general advantages.
- eru 15y ago> (e.g. all the verbs at the end of the sentence) Can happen in German. But I find written English actually worse, because it is often so ambiguous to parse---so you have to keep the words in mind and not just the partial abstract syntax tree (or whatever it is that my brains stores for complete sentences).
- gwern 15y agoThere are also some results from length of words; I remember reading that Chinese speakers had an effectively larger digit span because their numerals were single syllables as opposed to 'seven' or 'zero'.