Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language
Open accessAbstract
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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- Authors
- Martínez, E., Mollica, F., & Gibson, E.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- University of Edinburgh (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Martínez, Eric
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-07
- Volume
- 224
- Pages
- 105070
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4214835948
- Cited by
- 39
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 3 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 47.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Cognition (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Texas A&M Law Scholarship (Texas A&M University School of Law) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Legal Language and Interpretation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Text Readability and Simplification
- Keywords
- legal language, contracts, text comprehensibility, text recall, passive voice, jargon, working memory, legal theory, text editing, genre comparison
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Language, Memory, Short-Term, Mental Recall, Writing
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