Impact of the Text Simplification on Understanding.

The reduction of the linguistic complexity of medical texts to make them more understandable to a larger population is an important task. The simplification of texts involves several steps, among which our study focuses on the definition of complex constructions and on study of the impact of the simplification. For this study, we selected 20 texts from the medical domain on different topics, namely drugs, diseases, substances, and medical institutions. We identified complex linguistic constructions and carried out their manual simplification at syntactic, lexical and semantic levels. We then designed a questionnaire to test comprehension of the texts and conducted a study with 26 participants. The results of this study shows that simplified texts obtained higher number of correct answers than technical texts. This difference is statistically significant. The self-evaluation questionnaire, done at the beginning of the test, indicates that the participants tend to overestimate their understanding of medical information. Besides, there is no correlation between the time taken to complete the interview and the correct answers provided.