Comprehensibility: the psychological perspective

Psychological research into text comprehensibility began with classic readability research, which was already established as a separate research field in the Anglo-American area of the 1930s (classical work: Gray/Leary 1935). The main purpose of this research was to determine and optimise the readability of text materials. To this end, a large number of objectively countable linguistic- stylistic text characteristics was determined (e.g., word length, word difficulty, sentence length, sentence complexity) as well as their influence on the readability of a text (reading speed, expert opinion, comprehension tests etc.) (see Groeben 1982).