The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law ijsll (print) issn - ijsll (online) issn - Article ijsll vol 22. 2 – ©2, equinox publishing Ailiation The University of Hong Kong email: yeungmatty@gmail.com hiuchi@hku.hk doi : 10.1558/ijsll.v22i1.17224 An empirical study of lay comprehension of Chinese legal reference texts in Hong Kong Matthew W. L. Yeung and Janny H. C. Leung Abstract his socio-legal study empirically assesses the use of plain language in improving comprehension of legal reference texts by laypeople in Hong Kong, where com- mon-law Chinese was newly engineered. Our study shows that native Chinese speakers have problems understanding the materials, but simple modiications of the texts can signiicantly improve their comprehension. he results suggest that the seeming incapability of expressing law in a language may not be related to the choice of code, but to how it is written. Based on the data, this study contrib- utes to the improvement of legal communication by identifying features of com- mon-law Chinese that make these materials diicult to understand, and proposes language-speciic plain-language strategies that can improve comprehensibility. keywords plain language, common-law chinese, textual analysis, legal communication, comprehension