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.
The study, “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The dataset used in the study is available here.
For the research, professors Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Petar Milin, Professor of Psychology of Language and Language Learning, discovered a direct correlation between instances of bad grammar and subjects’ Heart Rate Variability (HRV).