Prolonged exposure to World Wrestling Entertainment programming has been linked to diminished language skills, according to a recent survey that shows the many wrestling fans’ vocabularies have been reduced to “yes,” “no” and “what?!”

“This is an alarming discovery that proves wrestling has a deleterious effect on the speech centers of the brain,” said linguistics professor Rupert Mayfield of Yale University.

“A decade ago, most wrestling fans could string together simple sentences — for instance, ‘And that’s the bottom line because Stone Cold said so’ — but we are seeing a downward trend.”

A survey conducted by Kayfabe News reached similar conclusions.

Asked whether watching WWE programming had affected their vocabulary, 72 percent of fans responded “yes,” 21 percent responded “no,” and the remainder apparently didn’t understand the question, responding with “what!?”