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Abstract The world’s languages exhibit a wide variety of reading and writing directions: scripts may run from left to right, as in German or English; from right to left, as in Arabic or Hebrew; from top to bottom, such as in Chinese or Japanese; or even from bottom to top, as in Tagbanwa (although this script is then read in horizontal rows). The directionality of a writing system is deeply embedded in the perceptual and motor routines of its users, shaping a wide range of spatial behaviors. Mastery of a language and its script influences spatial cognition in ways that reflect the orientation of that writing system (Bergen & Chan, 2005). Beyond its impact on spatial behavior, literacy acquisition may therefore be understood as a broader process of conceptual socialization. This process shapes cognitive preferences that extend beyond reading or writing, potentially constraining or facilitating the subsequent acquisition of scripts with different directionalities. In this paper, we examine how reading and writing direction influences the visual representation of spoken sentences with different syntactic structures.
Danhier et al. (Thu,) studied this question.