Evidence map›Paper›PMID 24100710›Full record

ArticleJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA2014

The effect of word familiarity on actual and perceived text difficulty.

Gondy Leroy, David Kauchak

Open access · bronzeAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
19citing papers in PubMed
3.5field-weighted citation impact, top 7% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

19 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Trial
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. A survey of automated methods for biomedical text simplification.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2022
    Article
  6. Developing a Short Assessment of Environmental Health Literacy (SA-EHL).International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022
    Article
  7. Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Predicting Transition Words Between Sentence for English and Spanish Medical Text.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2019
    Article
  12. Article
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Measuring Text Difficulty Using Parse-Tree Frequency.Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2017
    Article
  16. Article
  17. When synonyms are not enough: Optimal parenthetical insertion for text simplification.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2017
    Article
  18. Article
  19. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.

Gondy LeroyDepartment of Management Information Systems, Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
David Kauchak
Middlebury College · USUniversity of Arizona · US

Funding

Large-scale evaluation of text features affecting perceived and actual text diffiR03LM010902 · NLM · UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA · PI LEROY, GONDY · 2011 to 2012
$131k
NLM NIH HHS 1R03LM010902NLM NIH HHS R03 LM010902
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

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).

Indexed as

ComprehensionVocabularyFemaleHumansMaleComprehensionHealth LiteracyReadabilityText SimplificationUser Study

Identifiers

PMID24100710
PMCPMC3957403
OpenAlexW2112787834

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.