Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science research has long cited efficiency as an explanation of the linguistic behavior observed across the world's languages (e.g., Gibson et al., 2019, Grice, 1975). However, recent work on law has challenged this view, as linguistic phenomena associated with processing difficulty have been found to occur frequently in legal texts. Some have argued that linguistic complexity is intentionally deployed to signal the law's performative effects (Martínez et al., 2024). We test this idea experimentally by examining the effect of linguistic complexity on perceived authoritativeness. In a task where participants are asked to rate variously complex legal provisions, we assess the effect of syntactic complexity, jargon density, and modal usage on perceived authority of statutory law. We find that high jargon density is positively correlated with increased perceptions of authority when syntactic complexity is low and other indices of the legal genre such as the modal shall are absent.