How language gives your brain a break
Here’s a quick task: Take a look at the sentences below and decide which is the most effective. (1) “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen.” (2) “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.” Either sentence is grammatically acceptable, but you probably found the first one to be more natural. Why? Perhaps because of the placement of the word “out,” which seems to fit better in the middle of this word sequence than the end. In technical terms, the first sentence has a shorter “dependency length” — a shorter total distance, in words, between the crucial elements of a sentence. Now a new study of 37 languages by three MIT researchers has shown that most languages move toward “dependency length minimization” (DLM) in practice. That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. “People want words that are related to each other...