Background: Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics have facilitated major improvements on traditional readability formulas that aim at predicting the overall difficulty of a text. Recent studies have identified several types of linguistic features that are theoretically motivated and predictive of human…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

With its international constituency, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has a large a membership that primarily comprises non-native English speakers. Students have had challenges in understanding and appreciating the writings of one of the church's co-founders, Ellen White. The purpose of this study was to analyze the Testimonies for the Church and…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

One of the special arrangements in testing contexts is to allow dyslexic students to listen to the text while they read. In our study, we investigated the effect of read-aloud assistance on young English learners' language comprehension scores. We also examined whether students with dyslexia identification benefit from this assistance differently…

In this paper, we applied the crowdsourcing approach to develop an automated popularity summary scoring, called wild summaries. In contrast, the golden standard summaries generated by one or more experts are called expert summaries. The innovation of our study is to compute LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) similarities between target summary and…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

In our study we investigated second and foreign language (L2) sentence readability, an area little explored so far in the case of several languages, including Swedish. The outcome of our research consists of two methods for sentence selection from native language corpora based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML)…

Milton's style of pronominal reference in his essay, "Areopagitica," leads to a lack of comprehension at times and to slow processing. His use of demonstrative pronouns makes it difficult to identify antecedents precisely and quickly. For example, in one case a reader must go back over 400 words to find an antecedent. His use of relative…

A survey of the current research on readability formulas is presented in this paper, which distinguishes this research from research on the more general questions that surround formulas: What features of a text, particularly the language it is written in, make the text easy or difficult to read? and, What will predict that readers with particular…

The relationship of readability, "readable writing" techniques, and comprehension was evaluated in a series of five experiments involving United States Navy recruits. Eight expository passages from a standardized reading test were revised by using word lists to simplify the vocabulary and a restriction in syntactic structure to simplify…

A study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

A study investigated the effect of properties of words and texts on the incidental learning of word meanings during normal reading. Subjects--352 students in third, fifth, and seventh grades--read either expository or narrative passages selected from grade-level textbooks, and after six days were tested on their knowledge of difficult words from…

Linguistic cohesion involves the semantic and syntactic relationships that link sentences together. Research on linguistic cohesion is related to readability and to developmental and ability-level issues in reading/writing. Instructional strategies for low-ability readers/writers include predicting comprehension problems through cohesion analysis…