"Chunking" is an important concept here. Think about learning to read in.a script you're unfamiliar with (eg Cyrillic if your native language uses Roman script

"Chunking" is an important concept here. Think about learning to read in.a script you're unfamiliar with (eg Cyrillic if your native language uses Roman script). You need to learn the shape of the letters so you have to keep in mind multiple things just to process one letter. At some point you're familiar enough with the script that each letter becomes one "chunk" that you can recall and process mentally. This stage is equivalent to sounding out a word by sounding out each letter. At some point each word becomes a "chunk". Fun fact: they have done tests on reading and if you scramble the letters in text but anchor the first and last letter of each word, most fluent readers can still read the text. [1] After that groups of words become "chunks" but the barrier here becomes more nebulous. My point is that the number of chunks your brain can process at a time is relatively fixed (around 5 IIRC). So I'm not sure that language learning is the counterexample you may believe. [1]: https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-letters-4864305 https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-l...