So what am I supposed to do?

Abstract

Non-obligatory control (NOC) gerundive adjuncts (e.g. ‘By reducing the effectiveness of the treatment, patients remain contagious for a longer period’) are common in government documents and require readers to integrate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information to identify the subject of the gerund, a process that can be challenging for older adults and low-literacy citizens. In this self-paced reading and similarity judgment study, 47 Italian native speakers (age range 18–85, including both men and women, with varying literacy levels) evaluated whether a target sentence containing an NOC gerundive adjunct matched a probe sentence with a corresponding finite verb. Results show that 30% of older and low-literacy participants failed to comprehend NOCs, and older readers were significantly slower than younger ones. We conclude that minimizing syntactic complexity in official documents — such as avoiding NOCs — could improve access to essential information for weaker readers, particularly on critical topics such as health, employment, security, taxes, and education.