Román, A. 1 , El Fathi, A. 2 & Santiago, J. 1
1 Dept. de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
2 Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco.
How does reading and writing direction affects mental model construction from linguistic input? Sentences describing static scenes (e.g., “the table is between the lamp and the TV”) were auditorily presented, and the participant was to draw the scene. Both drawing order and object location were measured.
In Experiment 1 there were three groups of participants: monolingual native Spanish, Arabs living in Spain with a long immersion in Spanish culture, and Arabs living in Morocco. The first two groups listened to the sentences in Spanish, and the third group in the local Arabic dialect (Dariya). Replicating prior results by Jahn et al. (2007), Spanish participants tended to arrange the objects from left to right along a horizontal line, whereas the Moroccans placed objects from right to left. The Arabs living in Spain showed a left-to-right pattern, but milder than the Spanish group. Order of object drawing followed object location.
In Experiment 2 a new group of Moroccans listened to sentences in Dariya, in one condition, and either Spanish or French (their preferred second language), in another condition. Results showed an interesting within-subject dissociation between object location and drawing order. Whereas the location of objects did not vary, following always the typical Arabic right-to-left pattern, order of drawing depended on the language of sentences: Dariya sentences induced a right-to-left drawing order, but Spanish or French sentences reversed the direction of drawing.
Present results demonstrate that the processes involved in the order of drawing (production) and the spatial representation (mental model) can be dissociated. People draw in the same direction as they would write the language they are hearing (short term flexibility), but the spatial representation of sentence meaning is affected only after a long period of immersion in a different culture (long term flexibility).