lexical decision task

n. In the lexical decision task participants decide, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether a string of letters is, or is not, a properly spelled word, and reaction times and accuracy at making these responses are recorded. By understanding the factors that speed or slow lexical decision responses, psychologists are able to develop and test theories related to lexical memory (the mental store of words) and semantic memory (the mental store of word meaning and general world knowledge). This task originated out of research into mental chronometry (the study of human information processing and its time course) and has become the most widely used experimental technique for studying word recognition processes. This task has been used to assess how various factors affect word recognition, including word frequency, word length, orthographic neighborhood density, stimulus degradation, number of syllables, number of morphemes, part of speech, and relatedness, to name just a few.

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