Quite a few elastic terms on the Chinese top-10 list are similar to their English counterparts or near-counterparts: keneng (可能) and may; chang (常)/tongchang (通常) and usually/often; hen (很) and very; geng (更) and more; duo (多)/xuduo (許多) and many/most. These cover epistemic, scalar and approximate stretchers. While the most frequently used general stretcher in Chinese is deng, the most commonly used general stretcher in English is things. In terms of how the four categories of EL are distributed, the Chinese and the English data exhibit two different patterns, i.e., SC-AQ-GE-EP and EP-AQ-SC-GE respectively. A series of comparisons of the most-used stretchers of each of the four categories in the Chinese and the English corpora yield some interesting findings. There is a clear preferred epistemic stretcher in online health information in Chinese and in English respectively, i.e. keneng (可能) and may.

This chapter identifies various similarities and differences between the Taiwanese and Australian data. An approximate correlation was found between the severity of a disease and the difficulty of understanding EL. The intensity of items of EL in the excerpt also affects the perception of difficulty with EL. The more different elastic expressions there are in the excerpt, the higher the rate of difficulty the excerpt is likely to have. Our interview data further explain what makes it hard to understand EL. Some of the interview responses in Chinese correspond to those in English. Nevertheless, a striking difference was also identified as one response in the Taiwanese interview data was more oriented towards a perspective that considers society as a collective group or community, a phenomenon not found in the Australian data. Culture may also play a role, but culture cannot be simplified and reduced to one determinant held accountable for any given cultural differences. We suggest three broad factors that affect discourse comprehension difficulty caused by EL/VL: the reader, the health topic and the text.