In my PhD research, I am investigating the relationship between linguistic factors that affect processing fluency and the acceptance of information presented in written messages. 

Research has shown that factors such as prior knowledge, prior (con)textual information, plausibility of arguments, medium, and source credibility influence the acceptance of a (possibly incorrect) message. Additionally, research has suggested that linguistic factors, such as lexical complexity, coherence, and syntactic complexity influence processing fluency – an indicator of message acceptance. However, no research has investigated the extent to which processing fluency mediates the effect of linguistic factors on the convincingness of texts, which is the focus of this project. A comparison will be made between texts written by humans and texts generated by large language models (LLMs).