TABLE 1.
Linguistic indices used in five literacy profiles a
| Literacy profile | Linguistic indices | Description |
|---|---|---|
| LP_FK | Readability | The length of words (ie, number of letters or syllables) and length of sentences (ie, number of words) |
| LP_LD | Lexical Diversity | The variety of words used in a text based on D |
| LP_WQ | Word Frequency | Frequency of word in a reference corpus |
| Syntactic Complexity | Number of words before the main verb in a sentence | |
| Lexical Diversity | The variety of words used in a text based on MTLD | |
| LP_SR | Concreteness | The degree to which a word is concrete |
| Lexical diversity | The variety of words used in a text based on two measures of lexical diversity: MTLD, and D | |
| Present tense | Incidence of present tense | |
| Determiners | Incidence of determiners (eg, a, the) | |
| Adjectives | Incidence of adjectives | |
| Function words | Incidence of function words such as prepositions, pronouns etc | |
| LP_Exp | Age of Exposure | The estimated age at which a word first appears in a child's vocabulary |
| Lexical decision response time | The time it takes for a human to judge a string of characters as a word | |
| Attested lemmas | Number of attested lemmas used per verb argument construction | |
| Determiner per nominal phrase | Number of determiners in each noun phrase | |
| Dependents per nominal subject | Number of structural dependents for each subject in a noun phrase | |
| Number of associations | Number of words strongly associated with a single word |
Abbreviations: LP_Exp, Literacy Profile Expert‐Rated Health Literacy; LP_FK, Literacy Profile Flesch‐Kincaid; LP_LD, Literacy Profile Lexical Diversity; LP_SR, Literacy Profile Self‐Reported Health Literacy; LP_WQ, Literacy Profile Writing Quality.
a
We present examples of linguistic indices for LP_SR (n = 185) and LP_Exp (n = 8).