A Notional Theory of Syntactic Categories Book

I picked up this book after reading the introduction and the first chapter.

It sounded more like an essay than a book, but I was really interested in what I thought she was getting at with her thesis. I think the idea was that studies of how language is parsed by children and adults has only been in right-branching languages like English. The problem for me as a student of Japanese is that it's a left-branching language. For example in English: "He went to the store"; Japanese: "He Store to Went". It's not so bad for simple sentences, and those are natural to me now, but for complex sentences, I often have to stop and think. If it's spoken, I don't really have time to stop and think. So that the author was going to take a look at how left-branching languages are processed by the brain was very interesting to me.

My hope was to understand how native speakers parse sentences, so I could actively try to copy them until it became more natural. Unfortunately, the book quickly became inaccessible to me as the terms and diagrams require a background in linguistics.

Google and linguistics.stackexchange.com, are big helps for anyone who has the motivation to learn some topics in linguistics, but I didn't.

Going to have to put this essay down.