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Language Change in Text Difficulty, Syntactic Complexity and Lexical Diversity in American Newspapers over the Last 50 Years

Taha, Nadja (2024) Language Change in Text Difficulty, Syntactic Complexity and Lexical Diversity in American Newspapers over the Last 50 Years.

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Abstract:Newspapers evolved many times since their emergence with the introduction of new technologies and growing audiences. Recently however, people increasingly rely on social media for information. Newspapers need to stay competitive and therefore, it is interesting to know whether the language of the newspaper has changed to match this new digital writing style. This has been tested in 100 articles from the New York Times from 1974 until 2024 with 50 articles each from the politics and the sports section. Language change was tested in terms of text difficulty within a measure of U.S. grade level necessary to understand the text, syntactic complexity by calculating the mean sentence length and the clauses per sentence, and lexical diversity, counting the number of unique content words within the text. An interaction model was ran to investigate whether there is an effect of time, of genre (politics vs. sports) or an interaction effect of time with genre. Results showed no effect of time on either grade level, mean sentence length or clauses per sentence. An interaction effect for lexical diversity was found, with political articles increasing in unique words. Article genre had an effect on all measures with sports articles consistently scoring lower.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Clients:
Unknown organization, Niederlande
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:17 linguistics and theory of literature
Programme:Psychology BSc (56604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/102789
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