Hearing grammatical errors causes stress (and it's not just an impression)

Everyone has experienced that annoyance you feel when listening to or reading a blue pencil grammatical error. It is an discomfort that arouses a sensation somewhere between disgust and embarrassment and is even more visceral when the error (the most popular is a wrong subjunctive) is committed by a politician who is supposed to represent the whole of Italy in Parliament.

That sudden malaise

Someone has also studied this sudden illness (it is very similar to the discomfort felt when you hear the chalk screeching on the blackboard) which increases immediately after hearing a “che io vadi” or something similar. Two professors from the University of Birmingham, England, Dagmar Divjak, professor of cognitive linguistics and Peter Milin, professor of language psychology, have discovered that our organism enters into «stress mode» when you hear grammatical errors, highlighting a new dimension in the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition. The annoyance, therefore, also affects an organic parameter.

Heart rate variability

The research, published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, takes into consideration the English language and involved few people (just 41) but it may be enough to understand what it feels like when you come across a blunder that we consider unjustifiable. Researchers have discovered a direct correlation between grammatical errors (or poorly intelligible accents) and HRV (Heart Rate Variability), that is, the heart rate variability (physiological indicator of the activity of the autonomic nervous system), of the listener. What does it mean? A premise must be made first: heart rate variability measures the regularity of the time interval that separates one beat from another. Normally when we are relaxed, the heartbeat shows some variability in duration of this interval but when we are under stress this variability is reduced. The study shows that the more errors a person listens to, the less variable his heartbeat becomes, as if he were under stress.

The pace is too regular

«Reduced cardiac variability – he explains Matteo Cerriprofessor of Physiology at the department of Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences at the University of Bologna — is used as index of cardiac riskespecially after events such as a heart attack or heart failure. A rigidly regular rhythm means that the heart is less able to adapt to the body's needs and it is very constrained. It's as if you always walk at the same pace: if you lose balance you will fall because you are only able to walk with the same steps.”

But are there possible applications?

According to the authors, the study provides the first evidence that HRV can be used as an indicator of language proficiency using non-invasive and low-cost techniques such asand the wrist sensors adopted in the research. But how would this indicator of linguistic knowledge work? For example, putting a native English speaker face to face with a foreigner who speaks English. While the foreigner speaks English, the native speaker's HRV is measured: his physiological reactions will tell whether the stranger is speaking correctly or not. But this index will require further validation, underlines Cerri who concludes: «Many other factors may come into play, such as, for example, the pleasantness (or unpleasantness) of the voice or accent which could influence the results».