The Cognitive Load Approach.
Human Language Complexities.
Differences in the level of language abstractness can be observed even when humans describe the same events.
True statements, whether written or transcribed, will be more abstract than false ones.
The key is the overall abstractness score in the different languages used.
Cognitive load may reduce the complexity of false statements, affecting the simplification of both vocabulary and syntax.
The differences in sentence characteristics generated under different cognitive loads can be measured by dedicated indexes that are sensitive to changes in load.
The dependency distance by Heringer is one such proposal.
It is defined as the number of words intervening between two syntactically related words.
Dependency distance can measure the memory burden imposed on language processing and reflects the dynamic cognitive load of language generation under various conditions.
The Gunning Fog Index (FOG) takes a different approach to estimating text complexity as it computes ratios of complex words in terms of the number of syllables to all words.
