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Omit needless words: Sentence length perception

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  • Nestor Matthews
  • Folly Folivi

Abstract

Short sentences improve readability. Short sentences also promote social justice through accessibility and inclusiveness. Despite this, much remains unknown about sentence length perception—an important factor in producing readable writing. Accordingly, we conducted a psychophysical study using procedures from Signal Detection Theory to examine sentence length perception in naive adults. Participants viewed real-world full-page text samples and judged whether a bolded target sentence contained more or fewer than 17 words. The experiment yielded four findings. First, naïve adults perceived sentence length in real-world text samples quickly (median = 300–400 ms) and precisely (median = ~90% correct). Second, flipping real-world text samples upside-down generated no reaction-time cost and nearly no loss in the precision of sentence length perception. This differs from the large inversion effects that characterize other highly practiced, real-world perceptual tasks involving canonically oriented stimuli, most notably face perception and reading. Third, participants significantly underestimated the length of mirror-reversed sentences—but not upside-down, nor standard sentences. This finding parallels participants’ familiarity with commonly occurring left-justified right-ragged text, and suggests a novel demonstration of left-lateralized anchoring in scene syntax. Fourth, error patterns demonstrated that participants achieved their high speed, high precision sentence-length judgments by heuristically counting text lines, not by explicitly counting words. This suggests practical advice for writing instructors to offer students. When copy editing, students can quickly and precisely identify their long sentences via a line-counting heuristic, e.g., “a 17-word sentence spans about 1.5 text lines”. Students can subsequently improve a long sentence’s readability and inclusiveness by omitting needless words.

Suggested Citation

  • Nestor Matthews & Folly Folivi, 2023. "Omit needless words: Sentence length perception," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 18(2), pages 1-26, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0282146
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282146
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Justin Halberda & Michèle M. M. Mazzocco & Lisa Feigenson, 2008. "Individual differences in non-verbal number acuity correlate with maths achievement," Nature, Nature, vol. 455(7213), pages 665-668, October.
    2. Guido Marco Cicchini & Giovanni Anobile & David C. Burr, 2016. "Spontaneous perception of numerosity in humans," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 7(1), pages 1-7, November.
    3. Nestor Matthews & Leslie Welch & Elena K Festa & Anthony A Bruno & Kendra Schafer, 2020. "Global depth perception alters local timing sensitivity," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(1), pages 1-21, January.
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