Visuo-spatial Representations In Sentence Production: A Cross-linguistic Comparison Of The Effect Of Reading Direction In First- And Second-language - Info and Reading Options

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Previous studies have shown that reading direction of a language affects the direction in which events are organized and processed (Christman and Pinger, 1997). For example, when presented with mirrored images of moving objects, speakers of languages written from left-to-right (e.g., English) were found to prefer the images with a rightward directionality, while right-to-left readers (e.g., Hebrew speakers) preferred the ones with a leftward directionality (Nachson, Argaman, & Luria, 1999; Chokron & De Agostini, 2000). Limited evidence suggests a similar influence of reading direction on language processing tasks. One example is experiments testing language comprehension, in which monolingual speakers of left-to-right/right-to-left languages were asked to listen to action sentences and then create spatial representations of them by drawing. Speakers of left-to-right languages (e.g., German) tended to place the agent on the left of their drawings, while a reversed pattern was observed for speakers of right-to-left languages (e.g., Hebrew) (Maass and Russo, 2003; Dobel, Diesendruck and Bölte, 2007). Another example is studies investigating language production, where monolingual participants had to form sentences after being presented with two images side-by-side or one image with two characters. Speakers of left-to-right languages preferred to use the left image or character as the sentences’ subject, and vice versa for speakers of right-to-left languages (Bergen and Chan, 2005; Esaulova et al., 2021). To account for these findings and the impact of reading direction on cognition, several explanations were proposed. The first one was the cultural hypothesis, which postulates that repetitive behaviours associated with culture may reinforce or affect the existing functional hemispheric specializations, presumably at the level of cognitive strategies (Chokron, 2002; Paulesu et al., 2000). Reading and writing may act as such behaviour, leading to a leftward or rightward bias respective to the specific scanning bias of the language (Paulesu et al., 2000). The scanning bias is then reinforced as the reading direction of the language also affects other aspects of the culture, such as the direction of timelines (Fuhrman and Boroditsky, 2007, 2010). This hypothesis suggests that the described effect is mainly due to exposure to culture and is not language-specific. This might also explain the reports of no bias for speakers of left-to-right/right-to-left language, who live in a country where they are predominantly exposed to the opposing scanning direction (Altmann et al., 2006; Kazandjian et al., 2011). The cultural hypothesis, however, cannot account for the findings showing that the spatial bias in one’s mother tongue is not affected by long-term exposure to cultures in which languages are read in the opposite direction (Bergen and Chan, 2005). This theory also cannot explain the results of Román et al. (2015), showing that brief exposure to right-to-left text has led to a temporary change in the directionality of drawings of auditory sentences by Spanish speakers. A different approach for explaining the causes of this effect can be found in the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB) model (Suitner and Maass. 2016). This model proposes that this observed asymmetry develops from the embodied and habitual processes of handwriting and visual scanning involved in reading (Suitner et al., 2021). According to the model, the reading direction of a language determines where our attention is allocated initially, and which direction it follows. That leads to the creation of a generalized schema for action, which is then used for mental representation and interpretation across different cognitive tasks. Although theoretically sound, the SAB model has yet been empirically validated. The present study fills the current gap by offering the following: A) To add further evidence to the current literature on the potential effect of reading direction on language production, by comparing monolingual speakers of languages that were not yet tested (Hebrew and Persian). Hebrew offers an interesting case for studying the embodied aspect of the SAB model since the Hebrew letters cannot be joined and most of its characters are formed from left-to-right, unlike the cursive script and characters used in Arabic and Persian (Tversky et al., 1991). Furthermore, testing Persian allows us to address the recent advancement in the SAB model, suggesting that this spatial bias is weaker in flexible languages compared to rigid ones. Persian is considered a more flexible language due to omitting of first, second and third-person subjects being common, unlike in English and Hebrew (Vainikka & Levy, 1995). B) To examine if this effect is driven by (1) the directionality embedded within a culture, (2) uneven attention allocation, as proposed by the SAB model, or (3) language-specific representational schema regardless of cultural conventions or attentional allocation. The focus of this project is language production, and thus we will explore the mental representations generated during sentence production in two experiments. The participants will be asked to view side-by-side images and write sentences using the presented objects (based on Bergen and Chan, 2005). We aim to examine the three possible interpretations described above by testing English speakers residing in the UK, Hebrew speakers residing in Israel, and Persian speakers living outside of Iran (i.e., exposed to an opposite scanning bias) to address the cultural influence. We will also track the participants’ mouse movements during the experiment to monitor their attention, and finally, we will test bilinguals alongside monolinguals to examine whether their results differ depending on the experiment's input language (English or Hebrew/Persian). To control for the bilinguals' exposure to the opposing scanning bias and other languages, we will seek information about the following: their time spent living abroad, level of usage of English in daily life, knowledge of other foreign languages (Maass and Russo, 2003). We will also evaluate their English proficiency by using two tasks to measure reading fluency, taken from the standardized English test PTE (Pearson Test of English) (Pae, 2012; Riazi, 2013).

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