Thaindian News

London, June 7 (IANS) We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding the myriads of novel utterances every day.

How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules-syntax, says a new study from Glasgow University.

The study made use of a cognitive process called structural priming. Simply put, if you use a certain kind of structure in one sentence, you’re likely to use it again in a subsequent sentence.

“The structure of a maths equation correctly solved is preserved in memory and determines the structuring of a subsequent sentence that a person has to complete,” write the study authors, according to a Glasgow statement.

The study was conducted by psychologists Christoph Scheepers, Catherine J. Martin, Andriy Myachykov, Kay Teevan, and Izabela Viskupova of the University of Glasgow, and Patrick Sturt of the University of Edinburgh.

Neuroscientists have found evidence suggesting a link between maths and language, “but this is the first time we’ve shown it in a behavioural setup,” the study authors said, reports the journal Psychological Science.

To find out how abstract-and cognitively general this process is, the experimenters gave native English-speaking students a pencil-and-paper test containing a series of maths problems paired with incomplete sentences.

The subjects were variously successful in solving the problems. What does all this mean?

Our cognitive processes operate “at a very high level of abstraction,” the authors write.

And those abstractions may apply in similar fashion to all kinds of thinking- in numbers, words, or perhaps even music.