Spatial biases in understanding descriptions of static scenes: the role of reading and writing direction

Prior studies on reasoning tasks have shown lateral spatial biases on mental model construction, which converge with known spatial biases in the mental representation of number, time, and events. The latter have been shown to be related to habitual reading and writing direction. The present study bridges and extends both research strands by looking at the processes of mental model construction in language comprehension and examining how they are influenced by reading and writing direction. Sentences like "the table is between the lamp and the TV" were auditorily presented to groups of mono- and bidirectional readers in languages with left-to-right or right-to-left scripts, and participants were asked to draw the described scene. There was a clear preference for deploying the lateral objects in the direction marked by the script of the input language and some hints of a much smaller effect of the degree of practice with the script. These lateral biases occurred in the context of universal strategies for working memory management.