Toward a New Readability: A Mixed Model Approach

This study is a preliminary examination into the use of Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis, as a means of measuring English text readability. The study uses 3 Coh-Metrix variables to analyze 32 academic reading texts and their corresponding readability scores. The results show that two indices, one measuring lexical co-referentiality and one measuring word frequency, mixed with an estimate of syntactic complexity, yield a prediction of reading difficulty that is similar to traditional readability formulas. The study demonstrates that Coh-Metrix variables can contribute to a readability prediction that better reflects the psycholinguistic factors of reading comprehension.