> why do I read your comment left to right one word at a time?
Because in English word order is important (in fact, in most languages)
It would be fun to learn a completely independent word order language (I suspect Latin is like that) but I suspect this is one of the reasons this aspect died in romance languages, it's harder to understand and relying on word order makes it easier
so I speak such a language, but I still don't read it in parallel. also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical: I had inserted an error at the end of my first paragraph of the previous comment to illustrate this.
>also this parallel pattern-matching idea doesn't explain sentences that when parsed carefully are clearly ungrammatical:
Your confidence threshold of the meaning of the sentence was reached, so you didn't wait for the rest of the results to come back before moving onto the next sentence.
Had you needed to understand the sentence sequentially, you would be less likely to miss the grammatical error because you wouldn't be able to skip the word.
Yeah I agree it's not 100% parallel (that's why I took it out of your quote)
We kinda ignore mistakes when they don't clash with our heuristics (nobody reads every word, especially stop words)
You can see how people make mistakes by writing the way the words sound rather than constructing the phrase (and this happens accidentally as well, not because the person doesn't know the right words)
Because in English word order is important (in fact, in most languages)
It would be fun to learn a completely independent word order language (I suspect Latin is like that) but I suspect this is one of the reasons this aspect died in romance languages, it's harder to understand and relying on word order makes it easier