Language environment on the spatial action representation of phrases in bilingual-bidirectional readers

Kazandjian, S. 1, 2 , Zivotofsky, A. 3 & Chokron, S. 1, 2

1 ERT TREAT Vision, Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition; UMR 5105 CNRS-Université Pierre Mendès France; 1251, avenue Centrale; 38040 Grenoble; France
2 Service de Neurologie, Fondation Ophtalmologique Adolphe de Rothschild; 25 rue Manin; 75019 Paris; France
3 Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

The cultural hypothesis posits that well-trained behaviors can negate, influence, or reinforce proven hemispheric specializations of cognitive functions. One example is that of reading direction, which has been shown to influence visuospatial performance, as well as some spatial representations of verbal stimuli. The current study conducts a three-fold examination of the cultural hypothesis on action representations by looking at the role of native language, language environment, and verbal stimuli complexity among bilingual-bidirectional English and Hebrew readers. Phrase complexity was manipulated by presenting simple action phrases, as well as complex sentence structures involving multiple actions performed over time. The tasks were performed once in an English language environment and once in a Hebrew language environment. Results indicated a shift in spatial direction of the action representations depending on both phrase complexity and language environment. For simple Subject-Verb-Object phrases, the language condition appeared to determine the spatial representation, such that English was associated with left-to-right ordering and Hebrew with right-to-left. As task complexity increased, a greater bias is seen for the reading direction of the native language. This bias is reinforced when the stimuli are also presented in the bilingual-bidirectional readers’ native language. Results are compared with previous studies on reading direction and spatial tasks within cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and linguistics.