How well do word recognition measures correlate? Effects of language context and repeated presentations

The present study assessed to what extent different word recognition time measures converge, using large databases of lexical decision times and eye tracking measures. We observed a low proportion of shared variance between these measures, which limits the validity of lexical decision times for real-life reading. We further investigated and compared the role of word frequency and length, two important predictors of word processing latencies in these paradigms, and found that these influenced the measures to a different extent. A second analysis of two different eye tracking corpora compared eye tracking reading times of short paragraphs with reading of an entire book. Our results reveal that correlation between eye tracking reading times of identical words in two different corpora are also low, suggesting that the higher-order language context in which words are presented plays a crucial role. Finally, our findings indicate that lexical decision times better resemble the average processing time of multiple presentations of the same word, across different language contexts.

Dirix, N., Brysbaert, M., & Duyck, W. (in press). How well do word recognition measures correlate? Effects of language context and repeated presentations. Behavior Research Methods. Impact Factor: 3.597. Ranking Q1 (top 10%). PDF available here