A Factional Analysis of Objective Features of Printed Language Presumably Related to Reading Difficulty
Lawrence M. Stolurow, Josh Newman · The Journal of Educational Research · 1959
Interest in the psychology of language and pari ticularly in the question of what makes printed ma terials more or less readable has led to studies in which three distinguishable classes of v a r iables have been manipulated?typography, reader inter est, and style (e. g., 2,3,4). Thepresent study deals with style and is concerned with isolating pat terns of relationship among objectively measurable stylistic features of printed materials. Knowledge of the relationships which exist among the se so called objective elements of expression could con tribute to a parsimonious description of both funda mental linguistic variables and psychologically meaningful relationships between these variables and selected behavioral measures, particularly those associated with reading and with learning from printed materials. The exceedingly large number of objective meas ures of stylistic features makes it desirable for both applied and theoretical res earch to identify a smaller number of more fundamental variables. An observation made by Jespersen (7), coupled with knowledge of a widely used psychometric technique, provides both a rationale and procedure for accom plishing such a reduction. Jespersen pointed out that No language is logical in every respect, and we must not expect usage to be guided by strictly logical principles (p. 13). This statement, imply ing the absence of a logical basis for identifying fundamental characteristics of language usage, does not, however, exclude the possibility that factor an alysis could provide an efficient way of identifying intrinsic characteristics of language usage and cor responding variables which might have psychologi cal significance. A fortunate circumstance, the existence of an in tercorrelation matrix prepared by Gray and Leary (6), permitted the present analysis o f a sizable number of objective measures of expression. Ina large scale, and now classic study, these authors attempted to isolate those structural elements of j reading material related to difficulty when reading is done for the purpose of obtaining agene ral im pression of what is read. (p. 9). Method