Incidence and Impact of Missing Functional Elements on Information Comprehension using Audio and Text

Area of Science:

• Health Communication
• Linguistics
• Information Science

Background:

• Audio is a growing medium for disseminating health information.
• Optimizing audio for health communication requires understanding its components.
• Functional elements, crucial for sentence coherence, are often omitted for brevity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the prevalence of missing functional elements in health-related and general text.
• To assess the impact of missing functional elements on text and audio comprehension.
• To compare the effects of missing functional elements across different information formats.

Main Methods:

• Corpus analysis of medical (Cochrane) and general (Wikipedia) texts to quantify missing functional elements.
• User studies evaluating comprehension of text and audio paragraphs with varying degrees of missing functional elements.
• Algorithmic detection of functional elements, requiring linguistic expertise for identification.

Main Results:

• Functional elements were missing in 20-30% of sentences across medical and general text corpora.
• Increased missing functional elements correlated with higher perceived reading difficulty in text.
• Missing functional elements significantly impaired actual comprehension in both text and audio, with less information recalled.

Conclusions:

• The omission of functional elements is a common issue affecting information clarity.
• While audio formats show a reduced impact on perceived difficulty, actual comprehension is still negatively affected.
• Addressing missing functional elements is vital for improving the effectiveness of health information delivery via audio and text.