The Perils of Bad Grammar

Does good grammar matter? What happens when we listen to people who continually make grammatical mistakes? Should we make allowances for people who use bad grammar or do we respond negatively to their flubs and foibles?

And, is there any way to measure the impact when people use consistently bad grammar? If we are less likely to hire people who cannot speak correctly, we would conclude that the teachers who tell their students that there is no such thing as correct grammar are doing them a serious disservice.

As of now there is very little research about the way people react when they hear someone using bad grammar. Now I have seen the results of a study from the University of Birmingham in England. The researchers measured heart beats, how the heartbeat changes when people hear bad grammar. Obviously, this involves automatic reactions, not reactions directed by the conscious mind.

We can guess that when you hear someone mangling the grammar you need to expend extra energy to understand what is being said. You might even feel offended at the implied insult where someone is speaking to you in code.

Or better, you feel like you do not belong to the same team. Thus, bad grammar isolates. It produces social disconnection.

How does this impact children who learn different forms of neighborhood slang? When they do not learn to speak correctly, does this impact their ability to get or to do jobs?

The research has not raised another issue, one which the researchers do not address. Many people today think that it is perfectly correct to use the word “they” as a singular pronoun. It is not, but they will be sorely offended if you disagree.

Is it confusing to hear people use the plural form of they? Moreover, what about the use of idiosyncratic pronouns, like dese, dose, dem and duh. We have heard that hiring managers will discard applications that open with an announcement of preferred pronouns. Perhaps they are on to something.

Are the hiring managers reactionary relics or are they acting rationally? Is it prejudicial not to hire someone who speaks incoherent garble, or is it simply normal behavior? How much time will you waste in meetings if you need to translate someone’s agrammatical droning into English?

To be more scientific about it all, what happens in your brain when someone speaks to you using bad grammar? Obviously, you need to guess what he is trying to tell you. And you are wasting your little gray cells trying to fill in the gaps. The process will be stressful, and when you are trying to communicate you would probably prefer not to have to add an extra level of interpretation.

Moreover, when we hear someone making grammatical errors in speech, our heart reacts. One can easily understand that brain function would be damaged by listening to speakers who use bad grammar. One is somewhat surprised to discover that cardiac function also responds.

Eric Dolan reports for Psypost:

Our hearts may indeed “skip a beat” when we hear grammatical errors in speech. In a new study published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, researchers discovered that our heart rate variability, a measure of the heartbeat’s rhythm, changes in response to grammatical errors in speech. This finding suggests there is a deep and measurable connection between our physiological responses and our implicit understanding of language.

And, also:

“On the other hand, there was my hunch that some people (including myself!) get annoyed by grammar errors more than others, and I started to wonder whether this would have a measurable physical manifestation and whether we could capture this. We knew that our pupils react to ‘stress’: when something is scary or difficult, our pupils become larger. Heart rate is regulated by the same autonomic nervous system, so it could be expected that we’d find an effect in heart rate too.”

Apparently, expectations matter. When listening to native speakers we expect more grammatical competence. Thus, bad grammar in someone who is not a native speaker causes less of a reaction. 

Divjak and her colleagues found that when participants listened to speech containing grammatical errors, their heart rate variability changed noticeably. There was a significant decrease in heart rate variability in response to speech containing grammatical errors. This decrease was more pronounced when the error density in the speech was between 20% and 40%.

Interestingly, the decrease in heart rate variability was greater when the grammatical errors were made by native English speakers rather than non-native speakers. This suggests that errors made by native speakers were less expected and thus had a greater impact on the listeners’ physiological responses.

Reasonably, the researchers did not test such culturally fraught hot-button issues as pronouns. Instead they tested the use of article adjectives, like “a”, “an” and the. One imagines mistakes like-- an rabbit, a cars. 

Half of these samples contained grammatical errors specifically related to the use of articles, such as “a”, “an”, and “the”. 

If you are more conscientious, you are more likely to feel affected by people who use bad grammar. And you are less likely to seek out their company or to socialize with them. We all have different reasons for choosing or not choosing friends, associates and colleagues. This is the first time I have seen bad grammar on the list.

“For example, if we find that conscientious people react more strongly to language errors, would that mean they are more negatively inclined towards people who make errors, and could that mean, for example, that they would be less likely to hire a foreign applicant if they are interviewing candidates for positions?”