ABSTRACT
Psycholinguistic hypothesis put forth by Yngve (1960) according to which the development and structure of natural language depends on the limited storage capacity of the short-term memory, which can store only a maximum of seven independent units of information (e.g. names, numbers) at once. On the basis of Yngve’s calculations it turns out that left-branching constructions and self-embedding constructions burden the memory more than right-branching constructions.
