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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (14)
Research has shown that it requires less time to process information that is part of an objective causal relation describing states of affairs in the world ( She was out of breath because she was running ), than information that is part of a subjective relation ( She must have been in a hurry because she was running ) expressing a claim or conclusi...
Studies investigating the effect of connectives on comprehension have yielded different results, most likely because of differences in methodology and limited samples of texts and readers. We added and removed causal, temporal, contrastive, and additive connectives in 20 authentic Dutch texts. Dutch adolescents (n = 794) differing in reading profic...
Although there are many methods available for assessing text comprehension, the cloze test is not widely acknowledged as one of them. Critiques on cloze testing center on its supposedly limited ability to measure comprehension beyond the sentence. However, these critiques do not hold for all types of cloze tests; the particular configuration of a c...
Open Access version via Utrecht University Repository (https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/363346)
The first readability formulae were developed almost 100 years ago. Despite a fair amount of critique, readability formulae have retained their overall popularity. The main reason for this is that the need for objective measures of readability...
In my dissertation (Kleijn, 2018) I studied the effects of different linguistic features on the readability of texts for Dutch adolescents. Sixty texts were turned into cloze tests using the newly developed HyTeC-cloze procedure and all texts were carefully manipulated on one stylistic linguistic feature to create an ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ version...
Abstract in conference proceedings
The effect of lexical complexity on text comprehension and text processing was investigated in a strictly controlled cloze study (PPN=786) and an eye-tracking study (PPN=181). Secondary school students enrolled in different levels of the Dutch school system participated in the experiments. Comprehension scores increased and reading times decreased...
Cloze has never been widely accepted as a valid measure of text comprehension. We address the problems previously reported in literature and introduce an improved procedure: the HyTeC-cloze. The procedure was evaluated using data collected among 2855 Dutch secondary school students. The procedure matches and sometimes outperforms standardized tests...
Eye movement data and text comprehension data of 47 Dutch ninth grade pre-vocational students were collected to investigate the effect of syntactic dependency length on on-line processing and text comprehension. Sentence reading times increased when dependency lengths increased. No effect of dependency length on text comprehension was found.
T-Scan is a new tool for analyzing Dutch text. It aims at extracting text features that are theoretically interesting, in that they relate to genre and text complexity, as well as practically interesting, in that they enable users and text producers to make text-specific diagnoses. T-Scan derives it features from tools such as Frog and Alpino, and...
The connectives daardoor (as a result) and dus (so) can both mark forward causality in Dutch. However, they differ in specificity and subjectivity. Daardoor gives the reader a very specific instruction, since it can only mark objective cause/effect relations. Dus can not only mark subjective argument/claim relations, but also summaries and paraphra...
De uitingen “Het regende buiten.” en “De straten werden nat.” kunnen zowel met het connectief daardoor als met het connectief dus verbonden worden. De interpretatie van de relatie tussen de twee uitingen verandert daarmee. Terwijl daardoor leidt tot een feitelijke interpretatie van een relatie in de werkelijkheid, lijkt dus de relatie te veranderen...
Projects
Project (1)
While there is an urgent need for robust readability assessment tools, applicable to a range of communicative domains, none of the existing tools for Dutch offers a valid empirical basis and sufficient functionality. Recent developments in computational linguistics and discourse processing create possibilities to change this situation. We propose to develop a validated reading level tool, aiming at secondary school readers, adult readers of public information, and by extension, the Dutch-speaking population at large. First, a text-analytic tool is developed using the latest results of computational linguistics research. Second, cloze comprehension data are collected among secondary school readers, in a design assessing both differences between texts and between versions of the same text. Third, a subsample of texts is re-used to investigate on-line processing in eye-tracking studies. The combination of comprehension data and on-line processing measures provides insight in the way textual features affect the construction of cognitive representations. Fourth, additional cloze data are collected for adults reading government-citizen information texts in The Netherlands and Flanders. Fifth, the relation between cloze data and reading times on the one hand, and text features on the other hand, is analyzed in a multilevel regression analysis and in a machine learning study. These analyses are used to develop a reading level prediction tool: LIN (LeesbaarheidsIndex voor het Nederlands). This validated reading tool is relevant to various domains in society: education, publishing, government-citizen communication. It will provide the foundation for developing domain-specific readability and writing tools that has been missing so far.
