Table 1.
Descriptive statistics for variables included in LDA model.
| Feature | t | p | d | Mean (SD): Difficult messages | Mean (SD): Easy messages | LDA co-efficient |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Word range score, CW, SUBTLEXus | −7.897 | < .001 | −0.758 | 3.196 (0.172) | 3.303 (0.123) | 3.682 |
| Word age of acquisition scores, AW, Kuperman | 7.074 | < .001 | 0.679 | 5.496 (0.39) | 5.284 (0.26) | −0.291 |
| Lexical diversity (D) | 5.555 | < .001 | 0.533 | 89.827 (23.659) | 77.259 (23.543) | −0.002 |
| FW overlap, paragraphs | 4.854 | < .001 | 0.466 | 8.225 (4.016) | 6.379 (3.936) | −0.066 |
| FW frequency, COCA academic | 4.164 | < .001 | 0.399 | 16831.399 (3494.824) | ||
| 15496.32 (3257.931) | −0.001 | |||||
| Lexical diversity (Maas) | −4.022 | < .001 | −0.386 | 0.021 (0.003) | 0.023 (0.004) | 17.125 |
| Bigram association strength (delta p), COCA academic | 3.988 | < .001 | 0.383 | 0.045 (0.012) | 0.041 (0.01) | −7.369 |
| Terms related to action | −3.474 | < .001 | −0.333 | 0.609 (0.133) | 0.655 (0.142) | 1.073 |
| Syntactic similarity score | −3.429 | < .001 | −0.329 | 0.104 (0.031) | 0.116 (0.039) | 1.861 |
| Word familiarity, AW, MRC | −3.408 | < .001 | −0.327 | 593.239 (4.894) | 594.622 (3.825) | 0.001 |
| Fear and disgust words | 3.275 | < .001 | 0.314 | 0.118 (0.067) | 0.097 (0.07) | −1.606 |
| Verb overlap (binary), paragraphs | 3.225 | < .001 | 0.309 | 0.764 (0.257) | 0.674 (0.311) | −0.890 |
| Average number of direct object dependencies | 3.051 | < .010 | 0.293 | 1.253 (0.368) | 1.148 (0.355) | −0.043 |
| Words related to friends and family | −3.037 | < .010 | −0.291 | 0.191 (0.081) | 0.217 (0.095) | 2.099 |
| Argument overlap (binary), paragraphs | 2.853 | < .010 | 0.274 | 0.579 (0.197) | 0.524 (0.203) | −0.150 |
| Words related to joy | −2.849 | < .010 | −0.273 | 0.617 (0.501) | 0.788 (0.68) | 0.225 |
| Argument overlap, sentences | −2.708 | < .010 | −0.26 | 0.219 (0.078) | 0.241 (0.09) | 0.989 |
| Trigram range, COCA fiction | 2.697 | < .010 | 0.259 | 0.028 (0.008) | 0.026 (0.007) | −13.702 |
| Trigram frequency, COCA newspaper | 2.606 | < .010 | 0.25 | 0.429 (0.118) | 0.401 (0.111) | −0.985 |
| Pronoun overlap, paragraphs | 2.479 | < .050 | 0.238 | 1.354 (0.66) | 1.199 (0.648) | −0.175 |
| Construction frequency, SD, COCA fiction | 2.242 | < .050 | 0.215 | 650503.988 (135651.74) | 620837.079 (139117.53) | −0.001 |
| Word concreteness, AW, MRC | −2.183 | < .050 | −0.209 | 2.642 (0.136) | 2.669 (0.126) | 0.910 |
| Incidence of words related to objects | −2.086 | < .050 | −0.2 | 0.134 (0.053) | 0.145 (0.061) | 2.552 |
| Argument overlap, paragraphs | −1.941 | < .050 | −0.186 | 0.383 (0.159) | 0.413 (0.164) | 1.177 |
AW = All words; CW = content words; FW = function words; SD = standard deviation; M = mean.