Many studies of verbal behavior have little scientific point if their conclusions have to be restricted to the specific language materials that were used in the experiment. It has not been customary, however, to perform significance tests that permit generalization beyond these specific materials, and thus there is little statistical evidence that such studies could be successfully replicated if a different sample of language materials were used. Three tests are described that will allow generalization to a population of language materials.

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Although most studies of reading behavior have little scientific value if their conclusions have to be restricted to the specific materials that were used in the experiment, reading researchers have seldom used designs that would enable them to generalize beyond the particular letters, words, sentences, and so on they chanced to use. Data from an experiment by Carver are used to show that it is therefore likely that many experiments could not be replicated if different samples of materials were drawn. Evidence is also given that reading speed, if measured in a fine-grained unit such as letters per second, does not increase as passages become more difficult, but is a constant across a range that extends from first-grade texts to technical prose.

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Sul Ross State College4 experiments compared the comprehensibility of different grammatical transformations of a passage. In 2 experiments, difficult prose was simplified by transforming nominalizations, adjectivalizations, and passives to their activeverb transforms. In the other 2, nominalizations alone were compared to their active-verb transforms. In all 4 experiments-which used several different presentation modes and several different dependent variables-the active-verb transforms were found to be more comprehensible.