IDEST: International Database of Emotional Short Texts

We introduce a database (IDEST) of 250 short stories rated for valence, arousal, and comprehensibility in two languages. The texts, with a narrative structure telling a story in the first person and controlled for length, were originally written in six different languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish), and rated for arousal, valence, and comprehensibility in the original language. The stories were translated into English, and the same ratings for the English translations were collected via an internet survey tool (N = 573). In addition to the rating data, we also report readability indexes for the original and English texts. The texts have been categorized into different story types based on their emotional arc. The texts score high on comprehensibility and represent a wide range of emotional valence and arousal levels. The comparative analysis of the ratings of the original texts and English translations showed that valence ratings were very similar across languages, whereas correlations between the two pairs of language versions for arousal and comprehensibility were modest. Comprehensibility ratings correlated with only some of the readability indexes. The database is published in osf.io/9tga3, and it is freely available for academic research.This project was conducted as a part of E-READ COST action (IS1404). The first author received project funding from the Academy of Finland (decision number 334266). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Comprehension Performances of Explanatory Texts in French Language According to Their Characteristics: Evidence for 1229 Children from 2nd to 9th Grade

International audiencePurpose:The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of explanatory texts characteristics on comprehension performances in children from 2nd to 9th grade. Method: Several metrics have been applied to 40 explanatory texts, accounting for length, complexity and age accuracy. Children were asked to read an age-appropriate text, and answer questions evaluating surface, semantic and inferential dimensions of comprehension. Results: Results revealed that all group age obtained similar performances on surface questions, but younger children performed poorly in semantic and inferential questions in comparison to older ones, suggesting a weaker ability to rely on previous knowledge. Comprehension performances were also modulated by text characteristics. Principal Components Analysis identified metrics accounting for text coherence, namely number of words, word length and word frequency with 75% of variance explained. Multiple Regression Analysis allowed us to identify sentence length and word length as predictors of performances obtained at the surface and inferential questions. Conclusion: this research provides interesting evidence to increase our comprehension of explanatory text comprehension in French language for different grades. The results obtained should also be useful to develop further researches using text characteristics to predict readers' comprehension performances. . \textcopyright 2021 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of comprehensibility ratings for all texts, separately for the English translations and the original language versions.

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of comprehensibility ratings for all texts, separately for the English translations and the original language versions.</p

The total number of texts obtained per language and the number and percentage of texts retained in the database.

The total number of texts obtained per language and the number and percentage of texts retained in the database.</p

Fig 2 -

A scatterplot of the relationship between valence and arousal ratings for the English translations (left panel) and original texts (right panel). The different colors correspond to the six languages of the original texts.</p

Distributions of the valence, arousal and comprehensibility ratings for original texts and English translations.

(A) Valence ratings. (B) Arousal ratings. (C) Comprehensibility ratings.</p

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum arousal ratings for all texts, separately for the English translations and the original language versions.

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum arousal ratings for all texts, separately for the English translations and the original language versions.</p

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of the readability scores for the 250 English texts and their correlations (<i>r</i>) to the comprehensibility rating.

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of the readability scores for the 250 English texts and their correlations (r) to the comprehensibility rating.</p

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of the Flesch Reading Ease scores for the original texts and their correlations to the comprehensibility rating.

Means, standard deviations, and minimum and maximum values of the Flesch Reading Ease scores for the original texts and their correlations to the comprehensibility rating.</p

S1 Appendix -

(DOCX)</p