Telegraphic prose: the effects of three deletion schemes on comprehension and reading rate of three types of literature

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects upon comprehension, reading time, and reading rate of reducing science, news and fiction materials by three reduction methods. The reduction methods were based upon the identification and deletion of redundant words from the three literary passages at levels of 10, 30, and 50 percent reduction. Three reduction methods used in this study were based upon the identification of redundancy by grammatical category, word frequency, and subjective judgment. The grammatical parts of speech were labeled in each passage and a frequency list of parts of speech was obtained by which percentages of the least meaningful categories were omitted. Similarly, the word frequency reduction method was developed based upon the identification and deletion of percentages of high frequently occurring words in the passages. The third method of reduction provided a subjective evaluation of the redundancy in the passages. College subjects were asked to rank order the words in each sentence of the traditional passages in the order of their importance for comprehension. Reduced versions of each passage were constructed by eliminating the least important words from each sentence, based on the mean of the ranked word listings. The reduction methods were applied to each of the three types of literature. Thus, a total of 30 treatment passages were developed and randomly assigned to 741 college subjects who read their assigned version and answered a multiple choice and cloze comprehension test. ...