Subjective Text Difficulty: An Alternative Approach to Defining the Difficulty Level of Written Text

This paper outlines three operationalizations of the notion of text difficulty; text-based (objective), performance-based (behavioral), and a combination of the two (subjective). Text-based approaches such as readability formulae view “difficulty” as a characteristic residing in the text itself. Behavioral approaches disregard the text and focus solely on the performances of individual readers. The subjective approach outlined here matches a priori estimates of reading ability to objective measures of text difficulty to establish a criterion for each individual reader. Texts falling below the criterion according to the objective difficulty scale are defined as subjectively “easy”, those above the criterion are defined as subjectively “hard”. It is argued that individual performance characteristics are in part a function of subjective difficulty and that psychological research linking reading performance with general individual difference factors must therefore control for the subjective difficulty of texts used in research studies.