A lexical decision task is a type of experiment in psycholinguistics. Subjects are presented, either visually or auditory, 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. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Phonotactics (in Greek phone = voice and tactic = course) is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. ...

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. For a reflex, reaction time is the time from the onset of a stimulus until the organism responds. ...

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. Priming in psychology refers to activating particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...

External links

• Online Lexical Decision Experiment from the University of Exeter, with an interactive illustration of the concept and how it can be used.

The University of Exeter is the principal University in the English city of Exeter, in Devon. ...

References

[[|Harley, Trevor, ]],  () ( 2001). ""  [ The Psychology of Language. From Data To Theory], , , , : Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 0-86377-866-6..