title: Design of short Italian sentences to assess near vision performance.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To develop and validate 28 short Italian sentences for the construction of the Italian version of the Radner Reading Chart to simultaneously measure near visual acuity and reading speed.
  
  
  METHODS
  41 sentences were constructed in Italian language, following the procedure defined by Radner, to obtain "sentence optotypes" with comparable structure and with the same lexical and grammatical difficulty. Sentences were statistically selected and used in 211 normal, non-presbyopic, native Italian-speaking persons. The most equally matched sentences in terms of reading speed and number of reading errors were selected. To assess the validity of the reading speed results obtained with the 28 selected short sentences, we compared the reading speed and reading errors with the average obtained by reading two long 4th-grade paragraphs (97 and 90 words) under the same conditions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The overall mean reading speed of the tested persons was 189±26wpm. The 28 sentences more similar in terms of reading times were selected, achieving a coefficient of variation (the relative SD) of 2.2%. The reliability analyses yielded an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.98. The correlation between the short sentences and the long paragraph was high (r=0.85, P<0.0001).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The 28 short single Italian sentences optotypes were highly comparable in syntactical structure, number, position, and length of words, lexical difficulty, and reading length. The resulting Italian Radner Reading Chart is precise (high consistency) and practical (short sentences) and therefore useful for research and clinical practice to simultaneously measure near reading acuity and reading speed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics (Optics and Optometry), University of Florence, Italy; School of Optics and Optometry I.R.S.O.O., Vinci, Italy. Electronic address: calossi@tin.it.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Calossi
authors.affiliation: School of Optics and Optometry I.R.S.O.O., Vinci, Italy.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Boccardo
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics (Optics and Optometry), University of Florence, Italy; School of Optics and Optometry I.R.S.O.O., Vinci, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fossetti
authors.affiliation: Austrian Academy of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Radner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D014787:Vision Tests / Q000379:methods*; D014792:Visual Acuity; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Agudeza lectora; Agudeza visual; Near vision; Reading acuity; Reading speed; Velocidad lectora; Visión cercana; Visual acuity