User-Centered Approach to Designing and Evaluating Controlled Languages in the Nuclear Industry

Abstract

In high reliability organizations such as the nuclear sector, operational safety depends not only on technical expertise but also on the clarity and interpretability of written instructions. To mitigate the risks of misinterpretation, controlled languages (CL) have been proposed. However, CL rules are frequently designed top-down without sufficient involvement of end users. This study presents a user-centered approach to designing and evaluating a CL for procedural documentation in the French nuclear industry. Drawing on ergonomic linguistics and cognitive models of text comprehension, we designed an experiment involving 89 participants (55 nuclear experts and 34 non-experts) to evaluate 10 linguistic rules. Participants completed comprehension tasks on procedural instructions presented in two versions (with and without CL rules) across both nuclear and general (cooking) domains. This cross-domain design allowed us to disentangle domain expertise effects from general linguistic processing abilities and to identify rules that benefit all readers regardless of their background knowledge. Results showed that four rules yielded significant improvements in comprehension, with three producing universal benefits and others revealing expertise-dependent effects. Beyond domain knowledge, experts exhibited structural habituation to complex syntactic patterns, influencing their performance even on neutral content. These findings suggest that expert resilience to complexity is both semantic and syntactic, with implications for CL design.

Keywords: Controlled Language, Ergonomic Linguistics, Expertise, Nuclear Industry

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007564