Lexical Decision Task
In this task, you will see pairs of words or nonwords. Press "" if both are real words, "A" if one or both are not real words. Respond as quickly and accurately as possible.
Lexical Decision Task
You will see pairs of words or nonwords. Press "L" if both are real words, "A" if one or both are not real words. Respond as quickly and accurately as possible.
Show Details
Introduction
In a lexical decision task (LDT), a participant needs to make a decision about whether combinations of letters are words or not. For example, when you see the word "GIRL", you respond "yes, this is a real English word", but when you see the letters "XLFFE" you respond "No, this is not a real English word".
The task was introduced by Meyer and Schvaneveldt in the 1970s. Their study aimed to understand how long-term memory is organized and how we retrieve information from it. In the original study, Meyer and Schvaneveldt found that people respond more quickly to words that are related in their meaning than to words that are entirely unrelated. This demonstrates that reading a word "activates" related information that facilitates the recognition of other related words.
Today, the task is popular in both psychology and psycholinguistics. There are many variants of lexical decision tasks.
About this implementation
This task measures your ability to distinguish real words from nonwords and assesses semantic priming effects. This example is similar to the original Meyer and Svaneveldt Experiment 1, although this is just a demo with a few trials to give you a taste. In the original task, there were 48 associated word pairs. The task is to decide if both the words are real words (e.g., TEA and COFFEE), or not (e.g., TEA and CFREE). The words chosen in this specific task are created with the fantastic English Lexicon Project.
Further reading
- Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227-234.
- Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., et al. (2007). The english lexicon project. Behavior Research Methods, 39 (3), 445-459.