cognitive psychology. PhD 
Cognitive load is more for situations where you have to remember many things at once. I would call this "conceptual dependencies." I think about this in the same way that so many Java learners memorize the ancient incantation... "public static void main(String[] args)"
I don't think anyone has quantified this, but I feel like a useful metric is ratio of language concepts that you've memorized vs. understood. Or perhaps, the ratio of program text you could write from scratch vs. you have to copy/paste.
