Linguistic and emotional-valence characteristics of reading passages for clinical use and research

• There is little information on properties of reading passages that affect reading (e.g., arousal and valence).
• The three commonly used passages were found to contain emotionally valenced, high arousal, lower familiarity and polysyllabic content words.
• The paper provides a new well-balanced (and ranked high on ease of readability) passage that minimizes the impact of these properties.
• PWS error rates on a traditional passage and on the novel passage were correlated, yet many individuals showed a large difference between the two.
• We suggest a combined procedure, using more than one passage. The details on passage characteristics can inform clinical practice.