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Study finds Donald Trump speaks like a 3rd grade elementary schooler
Election day is finally here, and a new study has found that Donald Trump has the language complexity of a third-grader.
The presidential candidate uses simplistic words and sentences similar to that of an 8-year-old, while his opponent Kamala Harris speaks far more intellectually.
Study analyzes Trump and Harris’ language
The study analyzed the linguistic complexity of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris during the presidential debate which was broadcast via ABC News on September 11.
Their vocabulary was marked using a variety of factors, including average sentence length, number of complex words and how many nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs were used.
The Republican and Democrat candidates’ speech was then graded using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, a popular test that assesses how difficult a text is to read.
It uses formulas to analyze the length of sentences and words and produce a score between 0 and 18 which determines what US school grade the text would be suitable for.
Donald Trump speaks like a 3rd-grader
The study found that Donald Trump has the language of an elementary schooler aged between eight and nine. In the speech, he used 824 sentences which were 11.74 words long on average. Of the 9,675 words he used, only 601 were complex (6.2%).
This gave him an overall Flesch-Kincaid Grade score of 3.12 out of 18, which is equivalent to a third-graders level. For longer sentences of over ten words, his score increased slightly to 3.90, but this still correlates to the reading level of a third-grader.
This means his speech would have been very easy to understand for an eight or nine-year-old as he used short sentences and simplistic words. �Some of the most simplistic sentences were “I said that?”, “Well find out” and “No judge looked at it”.
Kamala Harris is a 6th or 7th-grader
In comparison, Kamala Harris only used 361 sentences and 6,673 words, but they were longer and more complex. Of the words used, 762 were complex (11.4%), and sentences tended to have 18.48 words on average – seven more than Trump.
This gave her an average Flesch-Kincaid Grade scale of 6.60, equivalent to the US reading level of a sixth grader. For sentences over ten words, this rose to 7.35, which is like a seventh grader, aged 12 to 13 years.
Politicians try to pack complex ideas into easy-to-understand, bite-sized sentences to reach a wide audience. However, the study shows Harris does this more intellectually, using sentences 57% longer than Trump’s with 26% more complex words.
In 2006, one academic journal predicted Trump’s IQ to be really high, a huge 156, which is far above average. This was mostly based on his education and later debunked, but take this IQ test to see if you’re as smart as Donald Trump is said to be.
This study was conducted by�QR Code Generator.
