All languages equally efficient at conveying meaning: study

London: There is no difference in the time it takes people from different countries to read and process their native language, according to a new study.

The research found that the same amount of time is needed for a person, from for example China, to read and understand a text in Mandarin, as it takes a person from Britain to read and understand a text in English.

The study, carried out by researchers from University of Southampton in the UK, Tianjin Normal University in China and the University of Turku in Finland, compared the way three groups of people in these countries read their own languages.

The 25 participants in each group - one group for each country - were given eight short texts to read which had been carefully translated into the three different languages. A rigorous translation process was used to make the texts
as closely comparable across languages as possible.

English, Finnish and Mandarin were chosen because of the stark differences they display in their written form - with great variation in visual presentation of words, for example alphabetic vs logographic, spaced vs unspaced, and
agglutinative vs non-agglutinative.

Researchers used sophisticated eye-tracking equipment to assess the cognitive processes of the participants in each group as they read. The equipment was set up identically in each country to measure eye movement patterns of the individual readers - recording how long they spent looking at each word, sentence or paragraph.

The results of the study showed significant and substantial differences between the three language groups in relation to the nature of eye movements of the readers and how long participants spent reading each individual word or
phrase.

For example, the Finnish participants spent longer concentrating on some words compared to the English readers. However, most importantly and despite these differences, the time it took for the readers of each language to read each
complete sentence or paragraph was the same.

"This finding suggests that despite very substantial differences in the written form of different languages, at a basic propositional level, it takes humans the same amount of time to process the same information regardless of the language it is written in," said Simon Liversedge from University of Southampton.

"We have shown it does not matter whether a native Chinese reader is processing Chinese, or a Finnish native reader is reading Finnish, or an English native reader is processing English, in terms of comprehending the basic
propositional content of the language, one language is as good as another," he added. The findings were published in the journal Cognition.