ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Science and Environmental Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1580377
How comprehensible are scientific experts? A multi-method comparison of linguistic analyses, surveys, and real-time audience responses
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute for Communication Science, Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
- 2University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
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The comprehensibility of scientific experts is fundamentally important but presents a challenge for experts and their audiences. The definition and evaluation of comprehensibility are central to developing approaches for improvement. On the one hand, comprehensibility can be indicated by linguistic measures; on the other hand, audience assessments represent comprehensibility perceptions. However, the extent of overlap between these perspectives remains unknown. We conducted two studies to address this gap by analyzing five debates on various scientific topics, each featuring three experts. Our approach involved an integration of computational linguistic analyses, surveys, and real-time response measurements. The findings demonstrate that content and linguistic complexity appear complementary in their relationships with audience ratings for comprehensibility. Interestingly, more complex expert statements corresponded to higher overall debate ratings, hinting at the potential influence of human factors. Therefore, recognizing this influence is critical for improving the communication between experts and laypeople.
Keywords: comprehensibility, computational linguistic analyses, audience assessments, real-time response measurement, expert debates
Received: 20 Feb 2025; Accepted: 02 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Taddicken and Thoms. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Monika Taddicken, Institute for Communication Science, Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
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