Linguistic Complexity and Text Comprehension: Readability Issues Reconsidered (Psychology of Reading and Reading Instruction Series)

Standard readability formulas are widely accepted as reliable means of determining text difficulty for readers. This book examines the shortcomings of these formulas, both for professionals who try to use these formulas to match texts with readers and for others who study how language is understood. Language comprehension experts in cognitive psychology, education, and linguistics present alternative viewpoints concerning the issue of effective readability predictors. The long-term result: new questions raised by the research in this book should help to make texts more comprehensible and to provide a theoretically sound model of language processing and interpretation.