Exploratory textual analysis of consumer health languages for people who are D/deaf and hard of hearing

摘要

In this paper, we compared the differences of the consumer health language use between people who are D/deaf and hard of hearing (D/hh), and the public. Due to their relatively limited e-health literacy, D/hh people might use less complex health texts than the general public in their online communication. To test the hypothesis, we utilized text mining and readability measurements to compare the language use of online health discussions of two groups. We collected health data from AllDeaf and Yahoo!Answers, representing online communities for deaf people and the public, respectively. Flesch Kincaid Grade and professional health vocabulary coverage were utilized to compare their health writing complexity. The results showed that the public did not use significantly more complex health texts and health vocabularies than D/hh people. Further explorations are needed to analyze other readability metrics and clarify the influence of platforms on health writing complexity.