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Article In: Written Language & Literacy
Vol. 28:2 (2025) ► pp.233–267

So what am I supposed to do?

Italian elders and low-literacy citizens struggle with gerundive adjuncts in government documents: A self-paced reading study

 | University of Pavia
 | University of Pavia
 | University of Pavia
 | University of Pavia
 | University of Pavia
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Non-obligatory control (NOC) gerundive adjuncts (e.g. ‘By reducing the effectiveness of the treatment, patients remain contagious for a longer period’) are common in government documents and require readers to integrate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information to identify the subject of the gerund, a process that can be challenging for older adults and low-literacy citizens. In this self-paced reading and similarity judgment study, 47 Italian native speakers (age range 18–85, including both men and women, with varying literacy levels) evaluated whether a target sentence containing an NOC gerundive adjunct matched a probe sentence with a corresponding finite verb. Results show that 30% of older and low-literacy participants failed to comprehend NOCs, and older readers were significantly slower than younger ones. We conclude that minimizing syntactic complexity in official documents — such as avoiding NOCs — could improve access to essential information for weaker readers, particularly on critical topics such as health, employment, security, taxes, and education
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Topic and purpose of the study
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1What Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) is and why it is difficult
    • 2.2NOC proliferates in bureaucratic Italian and government documents
    • 2.3Plain Language
    • 2.4Theoretical impications of our study
  • 3.Elders and low-literacy citizens in Italy
  • 4.Literacy and aging in reading comprehension
  • 5.Present study
    • 5.1Rationale
    • 5.2Research questions and predictions
  • 6.Method
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Literacy assessment
    • 6.3Experimental stimuli
    • 6.4Technique
    • 6.5Procedure
    • 6.6Data preparation and statistical analysis
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Accuracy (RQ1)
    • 7.2Reaction times (RQ2)
    • 7.3Probe sentence reading times (RQ3)
  • 8.Discussion
    • 8.1Elders and low-literacy readers struggle with NOC but for different reasons
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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