LEXICAL DECISION TASK
Introduction
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between
linguistic factors and psychological aspects (Jodai, 2011). It studies psychological and
neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and
produce language. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms in which
languages are processed and represented in the brain (Nordquist, 2017).
The term psycholinguistics was coined by Jacob Robert Kantor in his book ‘An Objective
Psychology of Grammar’ in 1936 but it was after the publication of the article "Language and
psycholinguistics: a review," by his student Nicholas Henry Pronko (1946) followed which
the use of the term finally became frequent.
Psycholinguistics has roots in education and philosophy. Modern researchers consider
psycholinguistics to be an interdisciplinary field. According to them, it makes use
of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how
the brain processes language, and also social sciences, human development, communication
theories and infant development theories, among others Hence, it is studied from a variety of
different backgrounds, such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and speech and
language pathology.
Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be divided into
answering the following questions: (1) how do children acquire language (language
acquisition)?; (2) how do people process and comprehend language (language
comprehension)?; (3) how do people produce language (language production)?; and (4) how
do people acquire a new language (second language acquisition)?
Lexicon
Language production concerns how people produce language, either in written or spoken
form, in a way that conveys meanings comprehensible to others. One of the most effective
ways to understand this process is to understand one’s mental dictionary or lexicon.
Theories of human language propose that lexicon exists and it contains a variety of
information about words. This lexicon holds information about a word's meaning (its
semantic content), it’s part of language (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), and its relationships to
other words (What can it follow? What can follow it? How can it be modified?).
Psychologists are interested in the organization of this lexicon.
The lexicon is similar to a dictionary in that it holds information about words and other
components of language. Physical dictionaries generally organize words alphabetically. This
arrangement makes it easy to find any word, provided the spelling is known or can be
guessed. Because dictionaries usually are used to find the meanings of known words or to
check if a word is spelled properly, this organization is useful.
In the mental lexicon, though, the most useful feature of a word may not be its spelling, but
its meaning and its relationship to other words. If words are arranged in the lexicon by
semantic relationships, words that are related to each other (e.g., chair, seat, table) would be
close together in the lexicon, whereas words that are unrelated to each other (e.g., chair,
dinosaur, broccoli) would be far apart.
Lexical decision task (LDT)
For decades, the most commonly used laboratory tasks for studying the cognitive processes
involved in printed word identification have been lexical decision and naming
(e.g., Jastrzembksi & Stanners, 1975; Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970; Zevin &
Seidenberg, 2006).
The lexical decision task (LDT) used in this experiment, is a procedure which is used in
many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves assessing
how quickly people classify a stimulus as a word or a non-word.
The term lexical decision task was coined by David E. M. and Roger W. S. to study semantic
memory and word recognition in the early 1970s (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971;1973). Since
then, the task has been used in thousands of studies, investigating semantic memory and
lexical access in general. The different versions of the task had been used by researchers for a
number of years.
In the LDT task, the subjects are presented with a mixture of words
and logatomes or pseudowords (nonsense strings that respect the phonotactic rules of a
language, like trud in English), either visually or auditory. Their task is to indicate whether
the presented stimulus is a word or not.
The analysis is based on the reaction time that is, how fast you are able to make your decision
about each letter string and sometimes on the basis of 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, one
might conclude that common words have a stronger mental representation than uncommon
words.
Rationale of the study
Meyer and Schvaneveldt's study
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. David and Roger's (1971;1973) study demonstrated this
phenomenon called priming, which occurs when the response to a visual stimulus (such as a
word) is influenced by the stimuli that preceded it. They found that subjects are faster to
respond to words when they are first shown a semantically related prime. For example,
participants are faster to confirm "nurse" as a word when it is preceded by "doctor" than
when it is preceded by "butter". This is one example of the phenomenon of semantic priming
David and Roger's study demonstrated that our semantic memory, which contains our
general knowledge, is organized into semantic networks, which can be thought of as a
network that contains word or concept meanings that are related. Semantic priming may
occur because the prime partially activates related words or concepts, facilitating their later
processing or recognition. Although this process is often automatic, priming can also be
guided by the use of specific strategies to achieve a particular task goal. For example, seeing
the word 'doctor', activates a node in a semantic network, which primes related words such as
‘nurse,' thereby increasing the speed by which we can identify the word 'nurse'.
Hoedemaker and Gordon (2014)
Even the study by Hoedemaker and Gordon (2014) found that the gaze duration for middle
words was faster when the preceding word was semantically related vs. unrelated, indicating
a semantic priming benefit in reading times. In their study, they tracked participants' eye
movements while they read three words in sequence using a gaze-contingent viewing
procedure where each word was only visible when it was fixated for the first time.
Practical Implications
Similarly, the LDT can be used to understanding the functioning of brain with respect to
language acquisition, language usage, language comprehension and language production.
Also the rationale of the study is useful to be applied as a teaching and learning aid. It
demonstrates how using techniques that associate new knowledge with the existing
knowledge in the brain can help in better retention for the same as an effect of semantic
priming.
Prediction of the experiment
Response times to the second word should be faster when the second item is a word that is
semantically associated to the first item than when it is unrelated.