Citation

Wagenaar WA, Schreuder R, Wijlhuizen GJ. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 1987; 1(3): 155-167.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1987, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.2350010302

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The readability of nine texts, written for the general public, was assessed by 12 different scores. Five of these scores were obtained from the structural analysis proposed by Kintsch and his colleagues. The analysis was applied on the macro-level of text composition. Four measures were related to reading speed. The three remaining measures were: subjective assessment of readability, the Flesch index, and the cloze percentage. The pattern of correlations among the twelve measures revealed a close relation between subjective assessments, cloze scores, Flesch indices, the number of propositions per 100 words, and all measures of reading speed. The four remaining measures proposed by Kintsch did not correlate with this group, nor did they correlate amongst each other. A principal-components analysis revealed two major factors which were identified as text difficulty at the micro-level and at the macro-level. It is concluded that a full description of readability requires analyses at both levels. Analysis at the macro-level will remain extremely time-consuming, especially since it can only be done by hand.

Language: en