Table A1.
Coh-Metrix Indices as a Function of Text Type
| Index | Text Type
|
p | Cohen’s d | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narrative | Expository | |||||
|
| ||||||
| M | SD | M | SD | |||
| Number of sentences | 25.90 | 11.61 | 14.50 | 2.88 | .016 | 1.35 |
| Number of words | 304.90 | 116.26 | 206.38 | 57.05 | .044 | 1.08 |
| Words per sentence | 12.73 | 4.15 | 14.14 | 2.64 | .417 | −0.41 |
| Syllables per word | 1.34 | 0.07 | 1.41 | 0.14 | .147 | −0.63 |
| Flesch Reading Ease | 80.88 | 9.65 | 72.91 | 14.28 | .177 | 0.65 |
| Celex Word Frequency (Log) | 2.23 | 0.14 | 2.21 | 0.23 | .833 | 0.11 |
| Content Word Concreteness | 420.88 | 18.09 | 435.34 | 23.85 | .162 | −0.68 |
| Connective to Verb Ratio | 0.43 | 0.22 | 0.61 | 0.23 | .117 | −0.80 |
| Connectives Incidence | 62.45 | 11.09 | 77.14 | 15.09 | .030 | −1.11 |
| Narrativity | 72.33 | 13.39 | 44.89 | 26.52 | .017 | 1.31 |
| LSA Sentence to Sentence | 0.15 | 0.07 | 0.31 | 0.07 | .000 | −2.29 |
| LSA All Sentences | 0.14 | 0.07 | 0.31 | 0.05 | .000 | −2.79 |
| LSA Paragraph to Paragraph | 0.31 | 0.11 | 0.49 | 0.13 | .005 | −1.49 |
Note: Means and SDs of indices are derived from the values across all passages classified as narrative or expository in the SDRT. Number of Sentences=mean number of sentences in the passage; Number of Words=total number of words in the passage; Words per Sentence=total number of words in the passage divided by total number of sentences in the passage; Syllables per Word=mean number of syllables per content word in the passage; Flesch Reading Ease=readability formula that measures text difficulty based on average words per sentence and average syllables per word in the passage (see Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers, & Chissom, 1975); Celex Word Frequency=log frequency of content words in the passage (nouns, adverbs, adjectives, main verbs in the passage, see Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993); Content Word Concreteness=ratings of word concreteness based on MRC Psycholinguistics Database (Coltheart, 1981), with scores ranging from 100 (abstract) to 700 (concrete); Connective to Verb Ratio=ratio of causal particles to causal verbs in the passage, thus representing causal relationships; Connectives Incidence=incidence of connecting words such as “and, so, then, or, but”; Narrativity=the extent to which the passage conveys a story (larger value) versus informational text (smaller value); LSA Sentence to Sentence, All Sentences, and Paragraph to Paragraph=semantic overlap based on meaning (see Landauer, McNamara, Dennis, & Kintsch, 2007).