Abstract
We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD. For word naming, it is the first phoneme. PDM was more influenced by a semantic variable (word imageability) than LD, but was also affected to a much greater extent by perceptual variables (word length, first phoneme/letters). This may reduce its usefulness as a psycholinguistic word recognition task.
Highlights
Visual word recognition in adults is fast, efficient, and relatively effortless, suggesting that word processing times will be the same for all words and invariant across tasks
We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482)
Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD
Summary
Visual word recognition in adults is fast, efficient, and relatively effortless, suggesting that word processing times will be the same for all words and invariant across tasks. This view underestimates the complexity of the processes involved. The findings are typically explored with regression analyses From these analyses it has emerged that word frequency is the most important predictor of visual LD times, accounting for up to 40% of the variance (of which 25% cannot be accounted for by other variables; Baayen et al, 2006; Cortese and Khanna, 2007; Brysbaert and Cortese, 2011). Word frequency explains less that 10% of the variance
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