Objective profiling of the difficulty of original texts (CÓDIGO FFI2010-15724)

This project will develop a computer application to analyze original and translated texts and excerpts in English, French, and Spanish, in order to predict their difficulty. The information will be provided to the user through an Internet-accesible interface, in two complementary ways: (a) by means of three indexes of lexical, syntactic, and textual difficulty, which will range between 1 and 100; (b) by ranking the new text within a text bank of 159 texts in that language. Difficulty indexes will be the outcome of statistical analyses of text values (independent variables) and the results of testing the reading speed and comprehension (dependent variables) of 72 subjects, who will have been profiled in four ways: demography, sociolinguistics, psychometrics, and folk theories. Our goal is to improve text and subject characterization and profiling in process research