A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar.
This headline makes it sound like Divjak’s paper was about grammar. They chose language as a means of testing the relationship between cognitive and physiological indicators. Department blogs misrepresenting faculty research to boost popular appeal is not helpful to anyone.
But also, even if it was about grammar, the paper describes measuring realtime stress markers like heart rate variability to infer difficulty processing information (or “mental contents,” as they phrase it) which to me sounds quite like a polygraph test. One may recall that these were abandoned years ago for their tendency toward false positives (among other things).
So naturally I would ask the authors, who didn’t mention it, the ways in which they controlled for false positives.
This headline makes it sound like Divjak’s paper was about grammar. They chose language as a means of testing the relationship between cognitive and physiological indicators. Department blogs misrepresenting faculty research to boost popular appeal is not helpful to anyone.
But also, even if it was about grammar, the paper describes measuring realtime stress markers like heart rate variability to infer difficulty processing information (or “mental contents,” as they phrase it) which to me sounds quite like a polygraph test. One may recall that these were abandoned years ago for their tendency toward false positives (among other things).
So naturally I would ask the authors, who didn’t mention it, the ways in which they controlled for false positives.