An experimental task in which subjects decide about specific lexical qualities of stimulus words or sounds. An experimental task in which subjects decide about specific lexical qualities of stimulus words or sounds. Examples include deciding if stimuli are real or are nonsense words or whether words belong to a specific semantic category. Lexical decision task have been used for the rehabilitation of the input lexicons.
There is evidence from a number of sources that phonological processing skills are independent of general cognitive abilities. Reading disabled children at all I.Q. levels show equal difficulty with phonological processing tasks such as pseudoword reading, recognising the visual form of a pseudoword, pseudoword spelling, and a phonological lexical decision task with written words (e.g. distinguishing which of two pseudowords sounds like a real word, given stimuli such as kake-dake, and joak-joap (Siegel, 1988).