The rules of grammar you follow while speaking may not reflect what you're thinking.

In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that speakers of subject-verb-object languages – "Bill eats cake" – reverted to a subject-object-verb form when asked to communicate with their hands.

"Bill cake eats" may sound counterintuitive to an ear weaned on English or any of the one-half of human languages that modify subjects with verbs, but it appears to follow the natural order of our cognition.

"This may reflect the real thought that comes before language," said study co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, a University of Chicago psychologist. "It seems pretty natural."

Goldin-Meadow's team asked forty people – ten speakers apiece of

English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, each of which follows the SVO

order, and ten speakers of Turkish, which follows an SOV order – to describe a series of simple actions, such as a girl turning a knob, with gestures.

Regardless of their native language, the subjects almost universally preceded object with verb: girl knob turns.

"We expected that the language they spoke would influence the language of their gestures, but it didn't," said Goldin-Meadow.

To test whether the subjects used subject-object-verb as a communicative strategy, they were given a series of illustrated transparencies, each depicting one element of a scene, and told that order was irrelevant: the final layered montage would look the same regardless of its assembly. The subjects still put object before verb.

"It almost speaks to the independence of language from thought," said Goldin-Meadow.

The implications of these unexpected results aren't yet clear. Speakers of subject-verb-object languages may actually experience a constant low-level cognitive stress from translating their thoughts into less-intuitive speech patterns, though Goldin-Meadow said it would likely be so tiny as to be undetectable.

However, such a cognitive load could become more apparent in neurologically damaged children, or in children who have trouble learning a subject-verb-object language.

"There's no evidence for this," she cautioned, "but maybe looking at kids with problems is the first step. Maybe we could understand that the child is thinking in a different way, and teach them a translation strategy."

The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally [PNAS]

Image: Paul Wicks

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