Students will gain firsthand insights into the factors that make a sentence more or less comprehensible for various groups of so-called "strong" and "weak readers," including older adults, individuals with low literacy, immigrants, and those with mild cognitive impairments. We will focus on “la scrittura di servizio”. That is, Service writing, documents with high practical and utilitarian purposes, or writing that serves a specific function, such as instructions, forms, or public information.
Course Prerequisites
Good Command of English: fluency in both spoken and written English, with particular emphasis on academic reading. Solid Foundation in Linguistics: Good understanding of core linguistic concepts, including syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Genuine curiosity about how the mind works, particularly in relation to written language comprehension and processing
Teaching Methods
Lectures, seminars, discussions and first hand knowledge of experimental eye tracking research in the Laboratorio di Linguistica e Glottodidattica Sperimentale (LLEGS) at the University of Pavia
Assessment Methods
Written exam. The detailed and complete knowledge of texts (1) and (2) above is required
Texts
(1) Rastelli, S. (2025). Plain Language A Psycholinguistic Approach, London, Routledge (2) PowerPoint slides commented in class
Contents
The course employs principles from the field of psycholinguistics to explore factors that make a sentence or text easy or difficult to process by the cognitive mechanisms that support language processing, and describes how levels of difficulty might function within bureaucratic power structures. Drawing almost exclusively from experimental data on readability, the course employs a metaphor of three "ghost" readers in the mind that exist and interact with each other: the syntactic reader (the one searching for the structure), the statistical reader (the one driven by previous experiences), and finally the pragmatic reader (the one searching for meaning). The course also describes a novel psycholinguistic experiment showing that complexly written texts may prevent adult citizens with average literacy skills from accessing important information related to their health, work, and right to representation, thereby drawing a line between the psycholinguistics of language comprehension and the maintenance of existing power structures.
