If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in

If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in to update the blob. Then at the end of the sentence they guess what you meant and respond to that, blind to what you was actually said as the tape recorder hears it. Which would be a very sensible way of working for people who don't have a lot of short term memory to play with, since remembering a complex sentence to parse is impossible. But it makes it challenging to process words as though they have inherent meaning, because they are really acting as deltas to some state. The precise meaning of the word cannot be preserved because it is conflated with the sentence as a whole. You see that abused a lot in politics, where people say one thing in a way that means what they say and the impression they give are different. So if trends go one way they supported the trend, and if the trends go the other way then they never actually said anything in support. I'll probably get away with pointing at Trump as an interesting example of that in reverse where his sentences usually don't make sense if you try to interpret them as sentences, but are crystal clear as a series of updates to some blob of state.