Hypothesis testSemantic Priming

Lexical Decision Task

The Lexical Decision Task is a computerized measure of word recognition and semantic processing. Participants judge whether letter strings are real words or nonwords (pronounceable but meaningless letter combinations). Response times and accuracy reveal how quickly people access word meanings, how semantic relatedness facilitates recognition, and how word properties (frequency, length, concreteness) influence processing. The task is foundational in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics for studying lexical representation.

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Sources

  1. 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. DOI: 10.1037/h0031564
  2. Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., et al. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods, 39(3), 445-459. DOI: 10.3758/BF03193014
  3. Yap, M. J., Sibley, D. E., Balota, D. A., Ratcliff, R., & Rueckl, J. G. (2015). Insights into lexical processing via large-scale crowdsourcing. PLoS ONE, 10(3), e0119616. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119616
ScholarGateLexical Decision Task (Lexical Decision Task). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/psychology/lexical-decision-task