Speaker: Lindsey Geybels
Affiliation: University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
Title: Determining Author or Reader: A Statistical Analysis of Textual Features in Children’s and Adult Literature
Abstract: Due to the nature of literary texts as being composed of words rather than numbers, they are not an obvious choice to serve as data for statistical analyses. However, with the help of computational techniques, words can be converted to numerical data and certain parts of a text can be examined on a large scale. Textual elements such as sentence length, word length and lexical diversity, which are associated by scholars on the one hand with the writing style of an individual author and on the other with the complexity of a text and the intended age of its readers, can thus be subjected to statistical evaluation. In this paper, data from little under 700 English and Dutch books written for different ages is analysed using a statistical linear mixed model. The results show that the textual elements studied are better qualified to detect the age of the intended reader of a text than the identity or age of the author.
