A STRUCTURED LITERATURE REVIEW OF TEXT COMPLEXITY IN CHILDREN’S STORYBOOKS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJEPC.1165011Keywords:
Children’s Storybooks, Children’s Literature, Readability, Linguistic Complexity, Text ComplexityAbstract
Text complexity matters when judging whether children’s storybooks are suitable for young readers in terms of language, development, and meaning. Yet studies of text complexity often approach the issue from different angles. Some focus on measurement, others on linguistic features, and others on how children respond to the text. As a result, these strands of research are not always brought together. This study reviews research on text complexity in children’s storybooks published from 2017 to 2026. The review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. Searches were conducted in Scopus and Web of Science using terms related to text complexity, readability, linguistic complexity, and children’s literature. After screening, duplicate removal, eligibility checking, and quality appraisal, 15 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis. The analysis produced three main themes. The first, Computational Measures of Text Complexity and Readability, covers readability formulas, automated linguistic measures, corpus-based resources, and computational modelling. The second, Linguistic Dimensions of Text Complexity, includes lexical, morphological, syntactic, grammatical, and discourse-related features. The third, Reader-Text Interaction and Text Complexity, considers children’s language resources, shared reading, social and technological support, presentation mode, and the relationship between visual and verbal information. The findings show that readability scores alone are not enough to explain text complexity. Difficulty also depends on the linguistic features of the text and on the conditions in which children engage with it. Based on these findings, the review brings three perspectives together. Computational measures show how complexity can be assessed, linguistic analysis helps explain which features make a text more demanding, and reader-text research shows how those demands may be experienced by children. Taken together, these perspectives provide a broader basis for selecting, evaluating, adapting, and developing storybooks for young readers.
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