ELP Lexical Decision Task
— Free to Take
The classic unprimed lexical decision paradigm, rebuilt from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007). A letter string appears; you decide as fast as you can whether it is a real English word or a made-up non-word. 200 real words spanning five frequency bands, each with a length-matched legal pseudoword. Free with a free account.
What the task measures
Lexical decision is the workhorse task of word-recognition research. The word-frequency effect — common words are recognised faster than rare words — is among the most reliable findings in cognitive psychology, and the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) is its definitive item-level reference: behavioural data for over 40,000 words collected across six universities.
This task administers 200 real ELP words — 40 in each of five HAL log-frequency bands, from very high frequency (everyday words) down to very low frequency (rare vocabulary) — plus one length-matched, orthographically legal pseudoword per word, built by the substitution method of Yap, Balota, Cortese and Watson (2006). Twelve practice trials open the run; the 400 scored trials include a self-paced rest break every 100 trials.
From your trials we report:
- Mean reaction time and accuracy for words and for non-words
- Mean reaction time in each of the five frequency bands
- The word-frequency effect — your very-low-band minus very-high-band slowdown in milliseconds
- The lexicality effect — how much faster real words are than non-words
- Signal-detection indices d′ and response criterion for the word/non-word decision
- Your mean word RT next to the mean of the same 200 items in the ELP reference sample — a descriptive comparison, not a norm
These are descriptive reaction times in milliseconds. No percentile and no standard score are reported: the ELP provides per-item mean RTs, not a per-subject distribution for this exact 200-item selection, so a percentile would require fabricated norms.
Common questions
What is the English Lexicon Project?
A large-scale behavioural database (Balota et al., 2007) with lexical decision and naming latencies for 40,481 words and 40,481 non-words, collected from over 800 participants at six universities. It is the standard item-level reference for English visual word recognition. All 200 words in this task carry their real ELP item means.
What is the word-frequency effect?
Words you encounter often are recognised faster than words you rarely see — typically a 50–150 ms difference between very common and very rare words. It is one of the most replicated effects in experimental psychology and a benchmark for models of lexical access.
Why is there no percentile score?
Browser reaction times depend on your display and input hardware, and the ELP publishes per-item means rather than a per-subject distribution for this exact item selection. Reporting a percentile would require inventing a reference distribution — something we do not do. Your within-session effects in milliseconds are the scientifically honest summary.
How is this different from the other lexical decision tasks here?
The Semantic Priming LDT presents a prime word before each target and measures priming; the AoA LDT contrasts early- vs. late-learned words. This ELP task is the unprimed baseline paradigm: it measures raw lexical access speed and the frequency effect across the widest frequency range, using the field's reference item set.
Is it really free?
Yes. The task is free to take with a free account. Create one in under a minute and your results are shown immediately at the end.