Difficulty Indices for 34 Texts in the Heard Text Recall (HTR) Paradigm: Measuring Text Comprehension and Memory

This publication presents difficulty indices for 34 texts and corresponding questions (Set_2) of the Heard Text Recall (HTR) paradigm as introduced by Schlittmeier et al. (2023). In the HTR, participants listen to short texts and answer nine open-ended questions after each text presentation, allowing for measuring comprehension and memory across various experimental conditions in a within-subject design. The questions are categorized into three types, asking for either names, family relationships, or other factual details. Data from 13 experiments involving 429 participants were analyzed to determine difficulty indices for each text (with each text tested a different number of times), each question type, and individual questions. These difficulty indices enable researchers to ensure a balanced level of HTR-task difficulty, which is particularly important for drawing meaningful comparisons between different experimental conditions. This publication serves as an initial reference, and we encourage researchers to contribute further datasets.