I went to Wikipedia to find out about Markov Chains. Being neither a mathematician nor BioInformationcist, I could not see any apparent application of Markov Chains and readability. It looked to me that they are more useful in modeling than analysis.

I'm not asking you to write up an example of how they could be used in this context, but just to elaborate (for us non-scholars).

I did find The Gunning Fog Index, which looks as though it might be a reasonable method of establishing a readability index. That article mentions Flesch Algorithms for scoring reading levels of material. Are there any Perl Monks with a background in educational pyschology?

P.S. This is too interesting a topic to lose in a flame war.

Update:

These later index methods are available in the CPAN Module Lingua::EN::Fathom. I haven't had a chance to even read the whole POD, but it mentions Fog, Flesch and Kincaid indices.