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Living in an asymmetrical world: how writing direction affects thought and action

Between 1956 and 1958, 22-year-old French psychologist Jean-Pierre Deconchy taught the youngest students at a primary school in the Lebanon. That school, whose students were largely Arabic Maronite Christians, was twinned with a training centre of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency “in an attempt to heal some of the wounds inflicted by the events in Palestine” (p. vii). Deconchy made a series of observations and conducted several investigations about the schoolchildren’s cognition in regard to the left-right axis in space. Their thinking was influenced by their first language, Arabic, which is written right to left. Deconchy was concerned that this first language complicated the children’s task of learning in French, a language written left-to-right. These studies were presented as part of Deconchy’s postgraduate diploma in philosophy with psychology. His research is translated into English and presented here as this book’s first three substantive chapters. It is accompanied by his foreword; and a short introduction, some commentary, and two chapters authored by Anna Maass and Caterina Suitner. These two psychologists describe current understanding of processing of information in the left-right axis, and of changes in research practices from Deconchy’s time to their own. Chapter 1 allows us to follow Deconchy’s route into his scientific problem. He noticed the commonness with which the Arabic children made “inversion errors” by inverting the order of two letters within the French words that they were learning to read and write. This observation lead him to the hypothesis that spatial mismatch between the writing directions of their native language of Arabic and the left-to-right text of French had complicated their learning task. Maass and Suitner have added useful inset “boxes” to Deconchy’s text both here and in the subsequent two chapters. In Chapter 1, they lift readers’ attention up from Deconchy’s investigations to brief discussions of the origins of writing direction in human languages and of contemporary research on the effects of language acquisition on children’s spatial thinking. In Chapter 2, we follow Deconchy through a series of diverse and imaginative experiments that show that his students found it more habitual, natural, normal, beautiful and easy to scan and produce images and physical objects from right to left rather than the Laterality, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 5, 639–641, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2015.1023204