Even laypeople use legalese.

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n = 59) million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments (n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law's complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law's authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a law and policy perspective, these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.

Distributed Sensitivity to Syntax and Semantics throughout the Language Network.

Human language is expressive because it is compositional: The meaning of a sentence (semantics) can be inferred from its structure (syntax). It is commonly believed that language syntax and semantics are processed by distinct brain regions. Here, we revisit this claim using precision fMRI methods to capture separation or overlap of function in the brains of individual participants. Contrary to prior claims, we find distributed sensitivity to both syntax and semantics throughout a broad frontotemporal brain network. Our results join a growing body of evidence for an integrated network for language in the human brain within which internal specialization is primarily a matter of degree rather than kind, in contrast with influential proposals that advocate distinct specialization of different brain areas for different types of linguistic functions.

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts-collectively referred to as the "plain-language movement"-have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period. We also compared the entirety of the U.S. Code (the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force) with a large sample of recently published texts from six baseline genres of English. We found that laws remain laden with features associated with psycholinguistic complexity-including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon, capitalization, and sentence length-relative to the baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined since the initial onset of the plain-language efforts. These findings suggest top-down efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, and call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal doctrines whose validity rests on the notion of laws being easily interpretable by laypeople. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).