I am German, so please excuse me, if my English isn't that good. There once was a study in Germany, what effect almost exclusively lower case in german texts would have. The result was, that texts are better understandable with nouns written with an upper case first letter. They serve as anchors, especially, when reading fast. Furthermore, in English it is common, that the same word is used as a verb and a noun. This actually would be a damn good reason to write nouns with an upper case first letter. When you skim through an English text, and notice, for example, the word "jump", you don't even know, if it is the verb or the noun. This can also be a source of ambiguity. Another big source of ambiguity is the usage of "it" to refer to almost everything, because most words don't have a grammatical gender. You have to be aware of that, when you are creating relative sentences in English. Even people are not always gendered in English. Is the tennis player female or male? You often have to read a fair bit into a text, until he/she (see?) is referenced as "her" or "him". I have seen some discussions between native English speakers on the internet, were someone wrote sth. like "Ah, so the teacher was your mother!" or "I thought, the cat was chasing the car, not the dog." Oh, this last example has another ambiguity. I should write "I thought, the cat, not the dog, was chasing the car". This ambiguity does not occur in German because articles are declined dependent on the gender and relation.
http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/...
To put it in a nutshell, it seems logical, that speed reading is especially hard in English. The more possible ambiguities you have, the more likely you will have to stop and think about, what is really meant.
