Do you have any references on this? I would be interested to read more about it.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

It sounds sensible. Certainly, this would be the recommended method to teach something new in Maths and the terminology/concept barrier exists there too.

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Ah yes! You're right! In some forms of maths the definition and concept are so closely linked that I didn't notice it, but yes this is how one usually does it!

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Sadly the references I had were in my Open University books that are now long gone. It was all in a language context too - it looked at the distribution of old and new information in sentences, and as I recall it, all languages have a very strong tendency to put the old (known) information before the new (unknown) stuff. I'm pretty sure this tendency was examined in neuropsychological studies of some sort - whether it was just a measure of processing time or of anything more complex, I can't remember, but there seemed to be very solid evidence that the brain processes old->new more easily that new->old.

For anyone not following me, here's a concrete example:

Naturally, we would tend to say "I have a friend whose name is Paul". "I" is trivially understood, known information. "a friend" is unsurprising, and not really the "information" of the sentence. The real information is that last word: the name.
If we turn that back-to-front, we get something like: "Paul is the name of a friend of mine." The first thing that hits the ear is new information, and we don't know why it's significant. It's quite confusing, and much more difficult to understand.

One of the simplest applications of this is in the teaching of vocabulary bilingually:
In an Irish class, saying "The Irish for 'house' is 'teach'," is much easier for the student to process than "'Teach' is the Irish for 'house'," for example. And yet some teachers will fixate on the target word and say it first.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Very interesting! I'm sure I can find some papers, I'll link any good ones here when I get them.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal