Crossley, Scott Andrew; Choi, Joonsuh; Tang, Kenny; & Cutting, Laurie E. (2026). The Tool for Automatic Analysis of Decoding Ambiguity (TAADA). Behavior Research Methods, 58(2), 40. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02922-w
This study describes and evaluates the Tool for Automatic Analysis of Decoding Ambiguity, or TAADA. TAADA is a tool designed to measure features related to decoding, which is the process of translating written text into spoken language during reading. It calculates metrics such as grapheme counts (number of written letter units), phoneme counts (number of speech sounds), neighborhood effects (how similar a word is to other words in spelling or sound), rhymes, and conditional probabilities that describe how likely certain sounds are to match specific spellings.
The researchers tested these measures in two reading studies. In the first study, they analyzed about 5,000 reading excerpts to see how decoding-related variables were associated with judgments of reading ease. They found that factors such as word frequency (how often a word appears in language), the number of similar-sounding or similarly spelled words (phonographic neighbors), word syllable length, and the reverse prior probability for consonants (how predictable a spelling is from a sound) together explained 34 percent of the differences in reading ease scores.
In the second study, the researchers examined how decoding variables were related to student reading miscues, meaning errors made while reading aloud. They found that word frequency, phoneme counts, rhyme counts, and probability measures explained about 3 percent of the variation in reading errors.
Overall, the findings suggest that TAADA can capture meaningful decoding features that relate to both perceived reading difficulty and actual reading performance.
Fig 1 : TAADA Interface