Text Analysis¶

Analyze passages for readability across phonological, lexical, semantic, and affective dimensions with interactive color-coded highlighting.

Overview¶

The Text Analysis tool provides comprehensive psycholinguistic profiling of text passages, computing aggregate percentile statistics across 35+ properties and enabling interactive word-level highlighting.

Key Features: - Aggregate percentile statistics for entire passages - Interactive highlighting by property with color gradients - Three preset phonetics passages (Grandfather, Rainbow, Caterpillar) - Coverage tracking (percentage of words in vocabulary) - Unknown word identification with dotted underlines

Use Cases: - Clinical: Assess therapy script complexity, select developmentally appropriate reading materials - Education: Evaluate text readability for students at different levels - Research: Analyze stimulus materials for controlled psycholinguistic properties - SLP: Track phonological, lexical, and semantic complexity of treatment materials

Basic Usage¶

Enter or paste text into the input field (or load a preset passage)
Click "Analyze Text" to compute aggregate statistics
Select a feature from the dropdown to highlight words by percentile
Review aggregate percentiles to understand overall passage characteristics
Hover over highlighted words to see individual percentile ranks

Analyzed Properties (35+ Across 9 Categories)¶

Phonological Complexity (3 properties)¶

Property	Interpretation	Color Scheme
Syllables	Lower = simpler	Orange gradient (light → dark)
Phonemes	Lower = simpler	Orange gradient (light → dark)
WCM (Word Complexity Measure)	Lower = simpler	Orange gradient (light → dark)

Phonotactic Probability (3 properties)¶

Property	Interpretation	Color Scheme
Phono Prob (Avg)	Higher = more typical	Red (rare) → Green (common)
Phono Prob (Sum Log)	Higher = more typical	Red (rare) → Green (common)
Positional Prob	Higher = more typical	Red (rare) → Green (common)

Lexical Properties (2 properties)¶

Property	Interpretation	Color Scheme
Frequency	Higher = more common	Red (rare) → Green (common)
Age of Acquisition	Lower = learned earlier	Orange gradient (early → late)

Semantic Properties (3 properties)¶

Property	Interpretation	Color Scheme
Imageability	Higher = easier to visualize	Blue gradient (low → high)
Familiarity	Higher = more familiar	Blue gradient (low → high)
Concreteness	Higher = more concrete	Blue gradient (low → high)

Affective Properties (3 properties)¶

Property	Interpretation	Color Scheme
Valence	Higher = more positive	Red (negative) → Green (positive)
Arousal	Higher = more exciting	Purple gradient (calm → excited)
Dominance	Higher = more powerful	Purple gradient (weak → powerful)

Preset Passages¶

Grandfather Passage¶

Type: Standard phonetics passage Purpose: Adult speech assessment, voice/resonance evaluation Length: 113 words Source: Standardized diagnostic passage for speech-language pathology

Rainbow Passage¶

Type: Classic phonetics passage Purpose: Voice quality assessment, speech rate analysis Length: 85 words Source: Fairbanks (1960) - widely used in clinical and research settings

Caterpillar Passage¶

Type: Pediatric speech sample Purpose: Child speech assessment, narrative language evaluation Length: 181 words Source: Standardized passage for pediatric speech assessment

Understanding Aggregate Percentiles¶

Aggregate percentiles represent the average percentile rank of all known words in the passage:

0-25th percentile: Very low on this property (e.g., very simple, very rare, very concrete)
25-50th percentile: Below average
50-75th percentile: Above average
75-100th percentile: Very high on this property (e.g., very complex, very common, very abstract)

Example Interpretation:

Syllable Count: 35th percentile → Passage uses words with fewer syllables than average
Frequency: 72nd percentile → Passage uses more common words than average
Concreteness: 20th percentile → Passage uses more abstract words than average

Interactive Highlighting¶

Color Schemes¶

Difficulty/Complexity (Syllables, Phonemes, WCM, AoA): - Light orange → Words at low percentiles (simple/early) - Dark orange → Words at high percentiles (complex/late)

Frequency (Frequency, Phonotactic Probability): - Red → Rare words (low percentiles) - Yellow → Medium frequency - Green → Common words (high percentiles)

Semantic (Imageability, Familiarity, Concreteness): - Light blue → Low ratings (abstract, unfamiliar, low imageability) - Dark blue → High ratings (concrete, familiar, high imageability)

Diverging (Valence): - Red → Negative valence (low percentiles) - Gray → Neutral - Green → Positive valence (high percentiles)

Intensity (Arousal, Dominance): - Light purple → Low intensity (calm, weak) - Dark purple → High intensity (excited, powerful)

Unknown Words¶

Words not in PhonoLex's vocabulary (44,011 words) are marked with: - Dotted gray underline - Reduced opacity (60%) - Hover tooltip: "Unknown word (not in vocabulary)"

Words with no data for the selected property are marked similarly: - Dotted gray underline - Hover tooltip: "[word]: No data for this property"

Clinical Applications¶

Therapy Script Assessment¶

Goal: Ensure therapy materials are developmentally appropriate

Steps: 1. Paste therapy script into Text Analysis 2. Review Syllable Count, WCM, and AoA percentiles 3. Target 25-50th percentiles for early intervention (simple words) 4. Target 50-75th percentiles for intermediate stages 5. Adjust script by replacing high-percentile words with simpler alternatives

Example:

Original: "The enormous elephant enthusiastically embraced exercise."
Analysis: Syllables (85th), WCM (92nd), AoA (88th) → Too complex for early intervention

Revised: "The big elephant liked to run and play."
Analysis: Syllables (35th), WCM (28th), AoA (15th) → Appropriate

Reading Material Selection¶

Goal: Match text complexity to student reading level

Steps: 1. Analyze candidate passages 2. Compare Frequency, Imageability, and Concreteness percentiles 3. Select texts with properties matching target level: - Early readers: High imageability (60-80th), high concreteness (60-80th) - Intermediate: Medium imageability (40-60th), mixed concreteness - Advanced: Lower imageability (20-40th), abstract concepts (20-40th)

Stimulus Control for Research¶

Goal: Match experimental stimuli on psycholinguistic properties

Steps: 1. Analyze Condition A passage 2. Analyze Condition B passage 3. Compare aggregate percentiles across all 35+ properties 4. Adjust passages to minimize differences in confounding variables 5. Re-analyze to confirm matching

Performance¶

Operation	Time	Notes
Text analysis	50-100 ms	Depends on passage length
Percentile lookup	<1 ms	Pre-computed during export
Highlighting render	5-20 ms	Depends on passage length

Scalability: Tested on passages up to 1,000 words without performance issues.

Data Coverage¶

Vocabulary: 44,011 English words from CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

Property Coverage (% of vocabulary with data): - Phonological properties: 100% (all words) - Phonotactic probability: ~51% (24,831 words) - Frequency: 100% (all words - filtering criterion) - AoA: ~9% (4,366 words - Glasgow Norms) - Imageability: ~9% (4,366 words - Glasgow Norms) - Familiarity: ~9% (4,366 words - Glasgow Norms) - Concreteness: ~50% (24,366 words - Brysbaert et al.) - VAD (Valence/Arousal/Dominance): ~27% (13,131 words - Warriner et al.)

Coverage Impact: Passages with technical/specialized vocabulary may have lower coverage. Unknown words and words without specific property data are clearly marked.

Limitations¶

Vocabulary Coverage¶

44,011 words covers 99%+ of typical English text
Proper nouns, neologisms, and specialized jargon may not be included
Non-English words and code-switching not supported

Property Availability¶

Not all words have all 35+ properties (see coverage above)
Missing properties marked with dotted underline when selected
Aggregate percentiles computed only from words with data

Interpretation Caveats¶

Percentiles are corpus-relative, not absolute measures
High-frequency words may be simple OR common depending on context
Semantic properties (imageability, concreteness) have lower coverage than phonological properties

Linguistic Limitations¶

General American English pronunciation only (CMU Dictionary)
Single-word analysis (no multi-word expressions or idioms)
No syntactic or discourse-level analysis

References¶

Data Sources: - Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). SUBTLEX-US word frequencies. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 977-990. - Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand English words. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 904-911. - Scott, G. G., et al. (2019). The Glasgow Norms. Behavior Research Methods, 51(3), 1258-1270. - Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (2004). Phonotactic probability for words and nonwords in English. Behavior Research Methods, 36(3), 481-487. - Warriner, A. B., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191-1207.

Standard Passages: - Fairbanks, G. (1960). Voice and articulation drillbook (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row. (Rainbow Passage) - Darley, F. L., Aronson, A. E., & Brown, J. R. (1975). Motor speech disorders. Philadelphia: Saunders. (Grandfather Passage)