Researchers often make participants jump through hoops. Due to our personal blind spots, it seems easier to realise the full extent of these acrobatics when we consider the work of other researchers. In linguistic research, the acrobatics are often spurred by unnatural grammatical constructions.
Unlike English, some Romance languages not only allow—but sometimes require—pronominal object clitics in preverbal position (Hanson & Carlson, 2014; Labotka et al., 2023). That is, instead of saying La maestra ha detto il nome (Italian) ‘The teacher has said the name’, Italian allows Il nome lo ha detto la maestra (literally, ‘The name it has said the teacher’), which could translate as ‘The name has been said by the teacher’, ‘The teacher has said the name’, or even ‘It is the teacher that has said the name’.