An Approach to Assessment of Reading Ability through Information Transmission
John McLeod, Jonathan Stephen Anderson · Journal of Reading Behavior · 1970
After Shannon's (1951) application of information theory to printed English, information theory enjoyed something of a vogue in experimental psychology, but some of the initial enthusiasm waned in the wake of criticisms of the naivete (Pierce 1962) and the doubtful validity (Cherry 1957) of many of the psychological applications. Nevertheless, within the restricted area of human communication, through both written and spoken language, the use of information theory would seem to be both appropriate and potentially useful. Shannon (1951) used a guessing game technique wherein a single subject was required to guess successive letters composing a message, and from the guesses an empirical estimate of the letter redundancy of printed English was made. Carterette and Jones (1963) demonstrated that contextual constraint, again taking printed letters as units, is related to readability. Estimates of redundancy of printed English have almost