Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy

Behavior Research Methods, Oct 2015

In the speeded word fragment completion task, participants have to complete fragments such as tom_to as quickly and accurately as possible. Previous work has shown that this paradigm can successfully capture subtle priming effects (Heyman, De Deyne, Hutchison, & Storms Behavior Research Methods, 47, 580–606, 2015). In addition, it has several advantages over the widely used lexical decision task. That is, the speeded word fragment completion task is more efficient, more engaging, and easier. Given its potential, we conducted a study to gather speeded word fragment completion norms. The goal of this megastudy was twofold. On the one hand, it provides a rich database of over 8,000 stimuli, which can, for instance, be used in future research to equate stimuli on baseline response times. On the other hand, the aim was to gain insight into the underlying processes of the speeded word fragment completion task. To this end, item-level regression and mixed-effects analyses were performed on the response latencies using 23 predictor variables. Since all items were selected from the Dutch Lexicon Project (Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 174, 2010), we ran the same analyses on lexical decision latencies to compare the two tasks. Overall, the results revealed many similarities, but also some remarkable differences, which are discussed. We propose that both tasks are complementary when examining visual word recognition. The article ends with a discussion of potential process models of the speeded word fragment completion task.

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Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy

Behav Res Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy Tom Heyman 0 1 Liselotte Van Akeren 0 1 Keith A. Hutchison 0 1 Gert Storms 0 1 0 Montana State University , Bozeman, Montana , USA 1 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven , Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven , Belgium In the speeded word fragment completion task, participants have to complete fragments such as tom_to as quickly and accurately as possible. Previous work has shown that this paradigm can successfully capture subtle priming effects (Heyman, De Deyne, Hutchison, & Storms Behavior Research Methods, 47, 580-606, 2015). In addition, it has several advantages over the widely used lexical decision task. That is, the speeded word fragment completion task is more efficient, more engaging, and easier. Given its potential, we conducted a study to gather speeded word fragment completion norms. The goal of this megastudy was twofold. On the one hand, it provides a rich database of over 8,000 stimuli, which can, for instance, be used in future research to equate stimuli on baseline response times. On the other hand, the aim was to gain insight into the underlying processes of the speeded word fragment completion task. To this end, item-level regression and mixed-effects analyses were performed on the response latencies using 23 predictor variables. Since all items were selected from the Dutch Lexicon Project ( K e ul e er s , D i e pe nd ae l e, & B r y s ba er t F ro n t i e r s i n Psychology, 1, 174, 2010), we ran the same analyses on lexical decision latencies to compare the two tasks. Overall, the results revealed many similarities, but also some remarkable differences, which are discussed. We propose that both tasks are complementary when examining visual word recognition. The article ends with a discussion of potential process models of the speeded word fragment completion task. Speeded word fragment completion task; Lexical decision task; Visual word recognition - In the last decade, the field of visual word recognition has seen a surge in so-called megastudies (see Balota, Yap, Hutchison, & Cortese, 2012, for an overview) . Generally speaking, a typical megastudy comprises several thousand items for which lexical decision, naming, and/or word identification responses are collected. The rationale behind megastudies is that they complement (traditional) factorial studies in which stimuli are selected on the basis of specific lexical or semantic characteristics. That is, factorial studies require one to experimentally control for a number of variables that could potentially obscure the effect(s) of interest. Megastudies, on the other hand, aim to gather data for as many stimuli as possible, without many constraints. The idea is that one can then statistically control for confounding variables by conducting a multiple regression analysis. In addition, continuous variables such as word frequency need not be divided into distinct categories (i.e., high-frequency vs. low-frequency words). This is a critical advantage of the megastudy approach, because artificially dichotomizing continuous variables has been shown to reduce power and increase the probability of Type I errors (Maxwell & Delaney, 1993) . In the present study we sought to build on this work, and we describe a megastudy involving the speeded word fragment completion task (Heyman, De Deyne, Hutchison, & Storms, 2015) . Each trial in this task features a word from which one letter has been deleted (e.g., tom_to).1 Participants are asked to complete each word fragment as quickly and accurately as possible by pressing a designated response key. Heyman and colleagues used two variants of this task: one in which one of five vowels could be missing (i.e., a, e, u, i, or o), and one in which one of two vowels could be missing (i.e., a or e). It is important to note that there was always only one correct completion, such that items like b_ll were never used. Heyman et al.’s main purpose was to develop a task that could successfully capture semantic priming effects. The idea was that the speeded word fragment completion task requires more elaborate processing than do traditional paradigms such as lexical decision and naming. This would, in turn, allow the prime to exert its full influence, and thus produce more robust priming effects. Indeed, Heyman et al. found a strong priming effect for short, highly frequent words, whereas the lexical decision task failed to show a significant effect for those items. In addition, Heyman and colleagues (2015) identified some other advantages over the lexical decision task. Specifically, the task is more efficient than lexical decision because it requires no nonwords, and participants rate it as more engaging and easier than the lexical decision task (Heyman et al., 2015) . Given the promising results and potential advantages, it would be fruitful to build a database of speeded word fragment completion responses. (...truncated)


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Tom Heyman, Liselotte Van Akeren, Keith A. Hutchison, Gert Storms. Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy, Behavior Research Methods, 2016, pp. 1508-1527, Volume 48, Issue 4, DOI: 10.3758/s13428-015-0663-3