Chapter 5 Psycholinguistics

5.1 Lexical Decision Task

Lexical decision tasks require participants to identify whether a word they are presented with is a real word (e.g. “bird”) or not (e.g. “quapbum”).

Formats

The Lexical Decision Task is available for Open Sesame:

Open Sesame - Online & Offline

Things you will need to know for your Methods section

The timing of individual trials (e.g. display time for each sketchpad) was based on Laurence, Pinto, Rosa, and Macedo (2018).

The words and non-words used in the present task were generated using the English Lexicon Project. The restricted parameters were:

For words:

  • Word length: 4 to 10 letters
  • Number of orthographic neighbours: 4 to 6
  • Log of Frequency of a word as reported by the HAL Study: 8 to 15
  • Concreteness Ratings: 4 to 5
  • Emotional Valence: 0 to 4
  • Emotional Arousal: 0 to 5
  • Number of Syllables: 2 to 5
  • Query Scope: Restricted ELP Lexicon

For non-words:

  • Word length: 4 to 10 letters
  • Orthographic neighbors that a word has: up to 15
  • BG_Freq_By_Pos: 4750 to 5000
  • NWI_Mean_RT: 200 to 1000
  • NWI_SD: up to 700
  • Obs: from 10
  • NWI_Mean_Accuracy: from 0.6

These restrictions produced a list of 30 words and 30 non-words. Click here for an overview of their characteristics

References for Lexical Decision Task

Laurence, P. G., Pinto, T. M., Rosa, A. T. F., & Macedo, E. C. (2018). Can a lexical decision task predict efficiency in the judgment of ambiguous sentences? Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 31(1), 13.

5.2 Assessig Degree of Bilingualism

The Language and Social Background Questionnaire (LSBQ) aims to provide an indication of how bilingual or monolingual a person is. It considers how frequently people use different languages, how proficient they are, and in what contexts they use different languages.

Formats

The LSBQ is analysed through an Excel spreadsheet, which can be downloaded here. Along with the Excel spreadsheet, a PDF in English is available.

References for LSBQ

Anderson, J. A., Mak, L., Chahi, A. K., & Bialystok, E. (2018). The language and social background questionnaire: Assessing degree of bilingualism in a diverse population. Behavior Research Methods, 50(1), 250-263.