Comparative Evaluation of Text and Audio Simplification: A Methodological Replication Study

This study serves as a methodological replication of Leroy et al. (2022) research, which investigated the impact of text simplification on healthcare information comprehension in the evolving multimedia landscape. Building upon the original studys insights, our replication study evaluates audio content, recognizing its increasing importance in disseminating healthcare information in the digital age. Specifically, we explored the influence of text simplification on perceived and actual difficulty when users engage with audio content automatically generated from that text. Our replication involved 44 participants for whom we assessed their comprehension of healthcare information presented as audio created using Leroy et al. (2022) original and simplified texts. The findings from our study highlight the effectiveness of text simplification in enhancing perceived understandability and actual comprehension, aligning with the original studys results. Additionally, we examined the role of education level and language proficiency, shedding light on their potential impact on healthcare information access and understanding. This research underscores the practical value of text simplification tools in promoting health literacy. It suggests the need for tailored communication strategies to reach diverse audiences effectively in the healthcare domain.

Effects of Added Emphasis and Pause in Audio Delivery of Health Information

Health literacy is crucial to supporting good health and is a major national goal. Audio delivery of information is becoming more popular for informing oneself. In this study, we evaluate the effect of audio enhancements in the form of information emphasis and pauses with health texts of varying difficulty and we measure health information comprehension and retention. We produced audio snippets from difficult and easy text and conducted the study on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Our findings suggest that emphasis matters for both information comprehension and retention. When there is no added pause, emphasizing significant information can lower the perceived difficulty for difficult and easy texts. Comprehension is higher (54%) with correctly placed emphasis for the difficult texts compared to not adding emphasis (50%). Adding a pause lowers perceived difficulty and can improve retention but adversely affects information comprehension.