Huerta, Natalie B.; Logan, Jessica A.; Cutting, Laurie E. (2026).听.听Reading and Writing Quarterly.听
Reading well, both quickly and accurately, is important for understanding a passage. This study asked which words are most important for readers to recognize correctly in order to understand a text, because that idea has been defined in different ways in past research. The researchers compared two ways of measuring word importance: word frequency, meaning how often a word appears, and word relevance, measured with a method called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), which estimates how important a word is to a specific passage by considering how often it appears in that passage and how unusual it is compared with other texts. They studied 191 adolescents ages 9 to 14 who read two informational passages while their reading errors were recorded. The researchers then tested whether frequency and relevance each helped predict reading mistakes, and whether different kinds of errors were linked to passage comprehension. The results showed that frequency and relevance are not the same thing when it comes to predicting reading errors. In particular, mistakes on words that were both uncommon and highly relevant to the passage predicted how well students understood the passage. Overall, the findings suggest that word relevance is a useful way to think about which words matter most in a text, and that considering relevance alongside frequency may improve both research and educational practice related to reading comprehension.
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Figure 2.听Interaction effect word frequency and word relevance on predicted probability of reading error.
