My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders ...

Günter Rohdenburg, Syntactic Complexity and the Variable Use of to be in 16th to 18th Century English, AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), pp. 199-228 ...

For native English readers, however, both the level of syntactic and semantic complexity of the text and the cultural origin of the story affected comprehension. The native language readers were ...