Kemper, S. (1988). Inferential complexity and the readability of texts. In A. Davison, & G. M. Green (Eds.), Linguistic complexity and text comprehension: Readability issues reconsidered (pp. 141-165). Hillsdale, England: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kemper, S.

1988

Kemper, S. (1988). Inferential complexity and the readability of texts. In A. Davison, & G. M. Green (Eds.), Linguistic complexity and text comprehension: Readability issues reconsidered (pp. 141-165). Hillsdale, England: Lawrence Erlbaum.

2

Readability formulas are criticized because they do not consider the contributions of the readers' background or expertise and ignore the meaning and content of texts. A new approach is proposed based on the analysis of texts as causally connected chains of actions, physical states, and mental states. A formula for measuring the inference load of texts is presented which uses multiple regression techniques. The inference load of texts reflects the difficulty readers have in inferring the causal connections necessary to recover the event chains underlying the texts. Using the inference load formula, the difficulty of texts can be adjusted for readers differing in skill or knowledge.

The inference load of a text did affect the speed and accuracy of subjects' answers. When the inference load of a text is increased from 7th-grade to 12th-grade reading levels, readers' accuracy in answering inference questions decreases 11% and their accuracy in answering factual questions decreases 24%. Further, the inference process that derives missing causal information to answer inference questions is slowed by the increase in inference load. Flesch readability affects text comprehension only when texts are already difficult to understand because they are high in inference load.

32

4