Lexical Decision Task
In this task, you will see pairs of words or nonwords. Indicate whether both are real English words — press "L" for yes and "A" for no, or use the on-screen buttons. Respond as quickly and accurately as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is a lexical decision task?
A lexical decision task asks you to decide whether letter strings are real words or nonwords, measuring word recognition and processing.
What is semantic priming?
Responses are faster to words related in meaning than unrelated ones, showing that reading a word activates related information.
How long does this demo take?
Less than 2 minutes.
Show Details
Introduction of Lexical Decision Task (LDT)
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 Experiment
This example is similar to the original Meyer and Schvaneveldt 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.
The demo takes less than 2 minutes to complete. Note, you can show your response times and copy and paste them to a local file for your own data analysis.
References
- 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(2), 227-234. 10.1037/h0031564
- Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., Neely, J. H., Nelson, D. L., Simpson, G. B., & Treiman, R. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods, 39(3), 445-459. 10.3758/BF03193014
- Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85(2), 59-108. 10.1037/0033-295X.85.2.59
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About This Experiment
This experiment is an educational adaptation for demonstration purposes. It is not a clinical diagnostic tool. Results reflect your performance in this specific session and should not be interpreted as an assessment of your cognitive abilities.
Data Privacy
Your experiment data is processed and stored locally in your browser. No data is uploaded to any server unless you explicitly export it.
