Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Cognition. 2022 Jul;224:105070. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070. Epub 2022 Mar 4.
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.
尽管合同在日常生活中的出现频率越来越高，但对于非专业人士来说，它们仍然难以理解。为什么呢？在这里，一项语料库分析（n ≈1000 万词）显示，与其他九种书面和口语英语基线体裁相比，合同中包含了令人惊讶的高比例的某些难以处理的特征，包括低频行话、中置嵌套从句（导致长距离句法依赖）、被动语态结构和非标准大小写。两项实验（N=184）进一步表明，包含这些特征的摘录比不包含这些特征的摘录的召回和理解率更低，即使对于有经验的读者也是如此，而中置嵌套从句比其他特征更能抑制回忆。这些发现（a）破坏了法律理论的专门概念论，根据该理论，法律是一个建立在对技术概念的专家知识基础上的系统；（b）表明这种处理困难主要是由于长距离句法依赖（即糟糕的写作）造成的工作记忆限制，而不是仅仅缺乏专门的法律知识；（c）表明编辑掉法律文本中的问题特征是可行的，对整个社会也是有益的。
