It was hypothesized that readability as indicated by the Miller-Coleman scaled paragraphs would be related to the reading rate for the paragraphs. An almost linear relationship was found between reading rate and readability for the paragraphs. However, when reading rates for each of the 150 word paragraphs were controlled for the physical length of the words, all paragraphs were read at approximately the same rate except for the most difficult paragraph. These results were interpreted as suggesting that the paragraphs can be validly represented as a scale of difficulty but not as a scale of readability.
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