The phrase "constrain understanding" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing limitations or restrictions on comprehension or insight.
Example: "The complex terminology used in the report may constrain understanding for those not familiar with the subject matter."
Alternatives: "limit comprehension" or "restrict insight."
Although no one believed more strongly than he that a worthwhile model has to make testable predictions, his work showed us how modeling itself creates and constrains understanding.
Finally, several elements in tree diagrams primarily constrain evolutionary understanding and may support preexisting evolutionary misunderstandings.
Apparently, the views of representation can expand or unduly constrain our understanding of representation depending on how the ways in which the term is used in contemporary politics.
Finally, encompassing the impact of transnational contexts helps to overcome the methodological nationalism that can otherwise constrain our understanding of the processes at play (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002).
However, accurate maps of rubber plantations are not available, which substantially constrain our understanding of the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of rubber plantation expansion.
This information is urgently required to constrain our understanding of CO2 fluxes at the Earth's surface (uptake by both the land surface and the oceans) and emissions from fossil fuel combustion".
Martin Heidegger called his method in Being and Time (1962) hermeneutical phenomenology in order to emphasize that the proper role of philosophical inquiry is to make explicit the implicit practices that constrain our understanding of what exists.
But now in the Critique of Judgment, Kant suggests that imagination and understanding can stand in a different kind of relationship, one in which imagination's activity harmonizes with the understanding but without imagination's being constrained or governed by understanding.
The SLA and L2W perspectives to feedback can be discussed in relation to two influential early publications that minimized the role of feedback in L2 teaching (Krashen [1982]; Truscott [1996]), and may have constrained possible advances in understanding the role of feedback in the ELT profession.
