Does hearing bad grammar make you physically cringe? It turns out out that it may well induce a medical phenomenon in the human body.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham took 41 English-speaking adults and subjected them to 40 samples of speech in English, half of which were riddled with grammatical errors. The participants were hooked up to a monitor that tracked their heart rate variability , which is the space between heartbeats.
The scientists found a "statistically significant reduction... in response to stimuli that contain errors." "The results of this study bring into focus a new dimension of the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition," said University of Birmingham professor and lead study author Dagmar Divjak. The results, he said, suggest that "cognitive effort reverberates through the physiological system in more ways than previously thought."