Meyer Bonnie J F, Marsiske Michael, Willis Sherry L
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Read Res Q. 1993 Jul 1;28(3):235.
A model is presented to predict the readability of documents encountered by older adults. The documents studied are contained in the Educational Testing Service's Test of Basic Skills (1977 edition) and require readers to answer questions about charts (e.g., bus schedules), labels (e.g., plant spray labels and prescriptions), and forms (e.g., tax forms). The components of the model came from theoretical and empirical work on discourse processing and include such factors as discourse structure, emphasis, and position of an answer in a linguistic analysis of the everyday document.A sample of 482 adults from 52 to 93 years of age took the everyday problems test as well as a psychometric ability battery. The correlation was .54 (p < .01) between the readability scores for test items predicted by the model and the percentage of older adults correctly answering those items. In addition, the more difficult test items as identified by the model were correlated more highly with fluid intelligence abilities (figural relations and induction), crystallized intelligence abilities (vocabulary, experiential evaluation), and with memory span.
提出了一个模型来预测老年人所遇到文档的可读性。所研究的文档包含在教育考试服务中心的基本技能测试（1977年版）中，要求读者回答有关图表（如公交时刻表）、标签（如植物喷雾标签和处方）和表格（如纳税表格）的问题。该模型的组成部分来自于话语处理的理论和实证研究，包括话语结构、重点以及在日常文档的语言分析中答案的位置等因素。482名年龄在52岁至93岁之间的成年人参加了日常问题测试以及一套心理测量能力测试。模型预测的测试项目可读性分数与老年人正确回答这些项目的百分比之间的相关性为0.54（p < 0.01）。此外，模型确定的难度较大的测试项目与流体智力能力（图形关系和归纳）、晶体智力能力（词汇、经验评估）以及记忆广度的相关性更高。
