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
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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)