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Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 224, July 2022, 105070
Cognition

Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty
in legal language

Author links open overlay panelEricMartinez^aFrancisMollica^bEdward
Gibson^a
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Abstract

Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts
remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus
analysis (n [?]10 million words) revealed that contracts contain
startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process
features-including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses
(leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice
structures, and non-standard capitalization-relative to nine other
baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=
184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were
recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these
features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded
clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings
(a) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory,
according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of
technical concepts; (b) suggest such processing difficulties result
largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance
syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack
of specialized legal knowledge; and (c) suggest editing out
problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial
for society at-large.

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