The role of word frequencies in detecting unfamiliar terms and their effect on response quality

Abstract

Research into cognitive aspects of survey response has indicated unfamiliar terms as one of the psycholinguistic determinants of question comprehensibility problems. In this paper the estimates of wording familiarity based on text corpora for the English and Slovenian languages were used to detect potentially incomprehensible wordings in two web survey questionnaires for international exchange students at the University of Ljubljana, one for incoming (English) and the other for outgoing students (Slovenian). Two versions of the questionnaire were developed for each language, one with low-frequency (complex) and the other with high-frequency (improved) wordings, and compared in a split-ballot experiment. The results show a lower drop-out rate and a decreased subjective perception of difficulty for the improved language versions.