Does Your Language’s Grammar Change How You Think?

image via New Scientist

April 14, 2025, 10:45 AM

• •The human brain accommodates fundamental grammatical differences across languages by adjusting how it processes each sentence.
• •Dutch speakers tend to preemptively finish each phrase in their head before it is complete.
• •Neither parsing strategy is necessarily 'better or worse' than the other.

A new study has found that the brain's response to information depends on the language's grammatical structure. For example, Dutch speakers tend to be more predictive in their processing of sentences than English speakers, as verbs come near the end of a sentence in Dutch rather than immediately after the subject like they do in English.

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