{
  "id": 10542829,
  "title": "Subjective and objective difficulty of English texts are related—but not the same",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/28/subjective-and-objective-difficulty-of-english-texts-are-related-but",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-28T22:00:13.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Phys.org",
    "slug": "phys-org",
    "url": "https://phys.org/news/2026-09-subjective-difficulty-english-texts.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Evaluating the difficulty of English texts in educational materials and language assessments is a key concern in English language education. Traditionally, researchers have used objective measures based on linguistic characteristics, such as word and sentence features. However, learners can have vastly different perceptions of a text's difficulty. To explore the connection between objective and subjective text difficulty, researchers examined how well objective estimates align with learners' perceptions. Their study, published in Reading and Writing, analyzed 30 English reading passages with varying difficulty levels. The researchers employed both established readability measures and an evaluation method based on a large language model to assess objective difficulty. Meanwhile, 41 undergraduate and graduate Japanese-speaking students rated each passage's difficulty on a nine-point scale. The findings showed a strong link between objective and subjective difficulty: passages deemed more challenging by objective measures were also rated as harder by readers. Both measures correlated with eye-movement patterns during reading, with more difficult texts leading to slower reading speeds and fewer words skipped. The study also found that the discrepancy between individual ratings and the group average for each passage provided additional insight into eye-movement behavior beyond what the text-level difficulty measures alone could explain. These results demonstrate that while objective measures and learners' subjective perceptions generally correspond, they are not identical. While objective measures are helpful for characterizing text difficulty, subjective evaluations offer deeper insights into how individual learners experience and process the same text. The findings have important implications for selecting reading materials that match learners' needs and for developing more personalized reading support and language education strategies.",
  "summary": "Evaluating the difficulty of English texts used in educational materials and language assessments is a central concern in English language education. Traditionally, researchers have relied on objective measures of text difficulty based on linguistic features, including characteristics of words and sentences. However, learners can differ substantially in how difficult they perceive the same text…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}