This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog wonied killed ate. The very same words can be rearranged to make an equivalent sentence anyone can under- stand: This is the dog that wonied the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt. The first sentence is hard to understand because so many verb processes interrupt one another that when the end of the sentence comes, three similar processes are still active-but they have lost track of what roles should be assigned to all the remaining nouns, namely, the rat, cat, and malt. Why do visual processes so rarely encounter similar difficulties? One rea- son is that our visual-systems can support more simultaneously operating processes than our language-systems can, and this reduces the need for any process to interrupt another one. A second reason is that the vision-agencies can choose for themselves the sequence in which they attend to details, whereas language-agencies are controlled by the person who is speaking