Determining Author or Reader: A Statistical Analysis of Textual Features in Children’s and Adult Literature

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 tech- niques, 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 sta... Mehr ...