Dal burocratese al “plain” Italian

Uno studio psicolinguistico sulla riformulazione del linguaggio della pubblica amministrazione

Abstract

In this work we report preliminary results of an experimental study about reformulation of Italian bureaucratic language which has involved a public administration. We used two typical documents targeting to citizens and re–wrote them in order to reduce their complexity. We adopted an interdisciplinary approach: on one hand, we used a computational tool which automatically analyses lexical and syntactic features of texts and calculates their readability indexes; on the other hand, we conducted some psycholinguistic experiments involving 20 citizens in order to verify the real impact of the linguistic reformulation on speakers’ performances. Findings showed that re–formulated versions are read faster, independently from their length, reminded and comprehended better by participants. Moreover, data suggest that not always readability indexes of documents are sufficient in capturing whether the modified texts really reduce the cognitive load which is required for their processing.