Because it is laid out in columns, this site doesn't display properly on a phone held vertically.
Please turn it sideways.
Because it is laid out in columns, this site doesn't display properly on a phone held vertically.
Please turn it sideways.
Some grammatical structures are harder to process than others because of their complexity, or because they increase the chance of processing error1
This page is not yet published. Go back
Some grammatical structures are harder to process than others because of their complexity, or because they increase the chance of processing error1
The Birmingham Mail2 reported:
This sentence imposes a high cognitive load because there are multiple nested clauses with no help from punctuation. And there is too much separating the subject from the verb.
Long sentences, with many nested clauses sitting inside each other, such as this one I am using as an example, frequently found in legal texts, official documents and regulatory documents, are hard to understand.
We have to park the whole thing in working memory until we get to the end of the sentence. Compare this:
Long sentences are hard to understand,because they often have many nested clauses sitting inside each other. They are frequently found in legal texts, official documents and regulatory documents.
The brain tries to deal with each word in the sentence and integrate it with previous content as it goes along. Because this happens quickly, sometimes we guess wrong about the structure of the sentence and have to backtrack.
The simplest sentences to process are those where bad guesses are impossible to make.
1. Field, J (2003). Psycholinguistics: A resource book for students. Routledge.
2. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/arsonist-jailed-stealing-car-teenager-22991593. Accessed 6 January 2025.