I would like to sum up a clear synthesis and state of the art of scientific traditions and ways to deal with language features as a whole. In a chapter entitled ‘Computational Models of Psycholinguistics’ and published in the Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics, Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen distinguish three main traditions in psycholinguistic language modeling :

• a symbolic (Chomskyan) tradition
• connectionnist psycholinguistics
• probabilistic models

They state that the Chomskyan approach (as well as nativist theories of language in general) outweighed until recently by far any other one, setting the ground for cognitive science :

“Chomsky’s arguments concerning the formal …

Continuing a series of reviews on readability assessment, I would like to describe a tool which is close to what I intend to do. It is named DeLite and is named a ‘readability checker’. It has been developed at the IICS research center of the FernUniversität Hagen.

From my point of view, its main feature is that it has not been made publicly available, it is based on software one has to buy and I did not manage to find even a demo version, although they claim to have been publicly (i.e. EU-)funded. Thus, my description is based …

It is not only a matter of scale : the perspective one chooses is crucial when it comes to visualize how difficult a text is. Two main options can be taken into consideration:

• An overview in form of a summary which enables to compare a series of phenomena for the whole text.
• A visualization which takes the course of the text into account, as well as the possible evolution of parameters.

I already dealt with the first type of visualization on this blog when I evoked Amazon’s text stats. To sum up, their simplicity is also their main problem, they …

The field of “gerolinguistics” is becoming more and more important. The word was first coined by G. Cohen in 1979 and it has been regularly used ever since.

How do older people read ? How do they perform when trying to understand difficult sentences ? It was the idea I was following when I recently decided to read a few papers about linguistic abilities and aging. As I work on different reader profiles I thought it would be an interesting starting point.

The fact is that I did not find what I was looking for, but was not disappointed since the assumption …

I recently read that Microsoft was planning to analyze several social networks in order to know more about users, so that the search engine could deliver more appropriate results. See this article on geekwire.com : Microsoft idea: Analyze social networks posts to deduce mood, interests, education.

Among the variables that are considered, the ‘sophistication and education level’ of the posts is mentionned. This is highly interesting, because it assumes a double readability assessment, on the reader’s side and on the side of the search engine. More precisely, this could refer to a classification task.

Here is an extract of …

I already mentioned Amazon’s text stats in a post where I tried to explain why they were far from being useful in every situation: A note on Amazon’s text readability stats, published last December.

I found an example which shows particularly well why you cannot rely on these statistics when it comes to get a precise picture of a text’s readability. Here are the screenshots of text statistics describing two different books (click on them to display a larger view):

The two books look quite similar, except for the length of the second one, which seems to …

I would like to write a word about the beginnings of computer-aided readability assessment research in Canada during the ‘90s, as they show interesting ways of thinking and measuring the complexity of texts.

Sato-Calibrage

Daoust, Laroche and Ouellet (1997) start from research on readability as it prevailed in the United States : they aim at finding a way to be able to assign a level to texts by linking them to a school level. They assume that the discourses of the school institutions are coherent and that they can be examined as a whole. Among other things, their criteria concern lexical …

How to build an efficient word list ? What are the limits of word frequency measures ? These issues are relevant to readability.

First, a word about the context : word lists are used to find difficulties and to try to improve the teaching material, whereas word frequency is used in psychological linguistics to measure cognitive processing. Thus, this topic deals with education science, psychological linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Coxhead’s Academic Word List

The academic word list by Averil Coxhead is a good example of this approach. He finds that students are not generally familiar with academic vocabulary, giving following examples : substitute …

Last week I had the chance to talk about complexity and readability with an experienced children’s books author, Sabine Ludwig (see also the page on the German Wikipedia). She has published around 30 books so far, as well as a dozen books which were translated from English to German. Some of them were awarded. The most successful one, Die schrecklichsten Mütter der Welt, had sold about 65.000 copies by the end of 2011 (although a few booksellers first thought it was unadapted to children). I was able to record the interview so that I could take extensive notes …

In a recent article about a readability checker prototype for italian, Felice Dell’Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni, and Giulia Venturi provide a good overview of current research on readability. Starting from the end of the article, I must say the bibliography is quite up-to-date and the authors offer an extensive review of criteria used by other researchers.

Tendencies in research

First of all, there is a growing tendency towards statistical language models. In fact, language models are used by Thomas François (2009) for example, who considers they are a more efficient replacement for the vocabulary lists used in readability formulas.

Secondly …