This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Lexical decision task is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
The lexical decision task is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords. Although versions of the task had been used by researchers for a number of years, the term lexical decision task was coined by David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt, who brought the task to prominence in a series of studies on the structure of semantic memory in the early 1970s. Since then, the task has been used in thousands of studies, investigating semantic memory and lexical access in general.
The task
Subjects are presented, either visually or auditorily, with a mixture of words and pseudowords (nonsense strings that respect the phonotactic rules of a language, like trud in English). Their task is to indicate, usually with a button-press, whether the presented stimulus is a word or not.
The analysis is based on the reaction times (and, secondarily, the error rates) for the various conditions for which the words (or the pseudowords) differ. A very common effect is that of frequency: words that are more frequent are recognized faster. In a cleverly designed experiment, one can draw theoretical inferences from differences like this. For instance, we might conclude that common words have a stronger mental representation than uncommon words.
Lexical decision tasks are often combined with other experimental techniques, such as priming, in which the subject is 'primed' with a certain stimulus before the actual lexical decision task has to be performed. In this way, it has been shown that subjects are faster to respond to words when they are first shown a semantically related prime: participants are faster to confirm "nurse" as a word when it is preceded by "doctor" than when it is preceded by "butter".
External links
- Prof. Meyer's Laboratory Website at the University of Michigan.
- Online Lexical Decision Experiment from the University of Exeter, with an interactive illustration of the concept and how it can be used.
References
Harley, Trevor (2001). The Psychology of Language. From Data To Theory. Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 0-86377-866-6.
Meyer, D. E., and Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227-234.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 29 June 2008, at 05:17.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Lexical decision task".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.