Liu, C. J., Kemper, S., & Bovaird, J. A. (2009). Comprehension of health-related written materials by older adults. Educational gerontology, 35(7), 653-668.

Liu, C.; Kemper, S.; Bovaird, J.

2009

Liu, C. J., Kemper, S., & Bovaird, J. A. (2009). Comprehension of health-related written materials by older adults. Educational gerontology, 35(7), 653-668.

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This study examined how Flesch Reading Ease and text cohesion affect older adults' comprehension of common health texts. All older adults benefited when high Flesh Reading Ease was combined with high cohesion. Older adults with small working memories had more difficulty understanding texts high in Flesch Reading Ease. Additionally, older adults with low verbal ability or older than 77 years of age had difficulty understanding texts high in text cohesion but low in Flesch Reading Ease. These results imply that writers must increase Flesch Reading Ease without disrupting text cohesion to ensure comprehension of health-related texts.

Our primary findings were that increasing Flesch Reading Ease by using shorter words or sentences led to worse comprehension by older adults with smaller working memories. This finding is unexpected as increasing Flesch Reading Ease is generally assumed to lead to improved comprehension (cf., Adams et al., 1979; Cotugna et al., 2005). Our findings suggest that older adults with limited working memories do not benefit from the use of short sentences and short words to increase Flesch Reading Ease. Increasing Flesch Reading Ease may, in fact, lead to the omission of critical connections among ideas as sentences by deleting causal and temporal subordinate clauses or phrases. Other strategies for increasing Flesch Reading Ease, such as using short words such as pronouns, e.g., ‘‘it’’, may also disrupt text comprehension by requiring readers to make more inferences.

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