The effect of word familiarity on actual and perceived text difficulty.
There is little evidence that readability formula outcomes relate to text understanding. The potential cause may lie in their strong reliance on word and sentence length. We evaluated word familiarity rather than word length as a stand-in for word difficulty. Word familiarity represents how well known a word is, and is estimated using word frequency in a large text corpus, in this work the Google web corpus. We conducted a [...]
Author(s): Leroy, Gondy, Kauchak, David
DOI: 10.1136/amiajnl-2013-002172