Lexical decision task

The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.

Although versions of the task had been used by researchers for a number of years, the term lexical decision task was coined by David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt, who brought the task to prominence in a series of studies on semantic memory and word recognition in the early 1970s. Since then, the task has been used in thousands of studies, investigating semantic memory and lexical access in general.