Propositional ideas density

(see entredonneur, consciousness and other glossary entries)

The idea-to-word-count ratio

1. 'Propositional idea density' is a psycholinguistic measurement denoting the number of propositions divided by number of words in given text.
2. Ideas density does not necessarily correlate with linguistic diversity or readability and has been applied in high level creativity studies (Runco, et al., 2017)
3. Some studies indicate that idea density is low in schizophrenics (Moe, et al. 2016)
4. Low idea density communication also been found to be a predictor of Alzheimer's disease (Sirts, et al., 2017)
5. It can be estimated using software. (Brown, 2008)
6. It can be related to the concept of catalysis when applied to the written organisation of ideas (Wood, 2022).

References

• Brown, C., Snodgrass, T., Kemper, S.J., Herman, R. and Covington, M.A., 2008. Automatic measurement of propositional idea density from part-of-speech tagging. Behavior research methods, 40(2), pp.540-545.
• Covington, M.A., 2009, March. Idea density—A potentially informative characteristic of retrieved documents. In IEEE Southeastcon 2009 (pp. 201-203). IEEE
• Moe, A.M., Breitborde, N.J., Shakeel, M.K., Gallagher, C.J. and Docherty, N.M., 2016. Idea density in the life-stories of people with schizophrenia: associations with narrative qualities and psychiatric symptoms. Schizophrenia Research, 172(1-3), pp.201-205.
• Runco, M.A., Turkman, B., Acar, S. and Nural, M.V., 2017. Idea density and the creativity of written works. Journal of Genius and Eminence, 2(1), pp.26-31.
• Sirts, K., Piguet, O. and Johnson, M., 2017. Idea density for predicting Alzheimer's disease from transcribed speech. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.04473.
• Wood, J., 2022. Writing the paradigm. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 15(1), pp.81-95.