Department of Management Information Systems, Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2014 Feb;21(e1):e169-72. doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2013-002172. Epub 2013 Oct 7.
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 study with 239 people, who provided 50 evaluations for each of 275 words. Our study is the first study to focus on actual difficulty, measured with a multiple-choice task, in addition to perceived difficulty, measured with a Likert scale. Actual difficulty was correlated with word familiarity (r=0.219, p<0.001) but not with word length (r=-0.075, p=0.107). Perceived difficulty was correlated with both word familiarity (r=-0.397, p<0.001) and word length (r=0.254, p<0.001).
几乎没有证据表明可读性公式的结果与文本理解有关。潜在的原因可能在于它们强烈依赖于单词和句子的长度。我们评估了单词的熟悉程度而不是单词的长度作为单词难度的替代品。单词的熟悉程度代表了一个单词的熟悉程度，它是使用大型文本语料库（在这项工作中是 Google 网络语料库）中的单词频率来估计的。我们进行了一项涉及 239 人的研究，每个人对 275 个单词中的每个单词提供了 50 次评估。我们的研究是第一个除了感知难度（用李克特量表衡量）外，还重点关注用多项选择任务衡量的实际难度的研究。实际难度与单词熟悉度相关（r=0.219，p<0.001），但与单词长度无关（r=-0.075，p=0.107）。感知难度与单词熟悉度（r=-0.397，p<0.001）和单词长度（r=0.254，p<0.001）都相关。
