New Analytical Models for determining Text Comprehensibility Standards in Mass-Media Communication
Journal Title: In Medias Res - Year 2018, Vol 7, Issue 12
Abstract
In this paper we are focused on the comprehensibility of mass-media texts within the theoretical context of media literacy and media competence, in order to determine the elements of standards for their comprehensibility. Our comparative analysis of texts (primarily political news reports) from Croatian national daily newspapers confirmed the hypothesis about their partial incomprehensibility and considerable variation in comprehensibility between different media outlets. We analysed 11 different categories: the amount of text in a sentence, word length, symbol length, average sentence length, average word length in syllables, lexical density, lexical redundancy, the density of entities, the complexity of words by their syllable length and frequency, and measures based on the estimated complexity of words in the newspaper corpus. By observing groups of individuals with different age, level of education, and social background, we found significant differences in their perception and understanding of mass-media texts, depending on their age and education. This leads us to conclude that standards for comprehensibility need to be determined by taking into account the previously obtained research findings, while continuing work to establish all relevant factors of the perception of media text, as well as ways in which they affect its comprehensibility. We selected those measures that are best suited for automated assessment of comprehensibility of newspaper reports in the Croatian language by pairing comprehensibility assessments from the consumers of media with the results of text complexity computer analysis. By using selected automated measures of text readability and the human perception of text readability, we attempted to make a contribution to determining the elements of text readability standards, as the minimum requirement for text readability.
Authors and Affiliations
Artur Šilić, Slobodan Hadžić
Keywords
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