[The effect of semantic satiation on a double lexical decision task]

It is known that a semantic satiation effect depends upon the characteristics of the task. For example, the effect has been found on a category decision task, but not found on a lexical decision task. Based on these results, previous studies concluded that because the task is influenced from factors other than semantic access, the lexical decision task was inadequate for semantic satiation. On the contrary, this study found the effect on a variation of a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, 16 college students performed a category-matching judgement. In Experiment II, 24 students performed a lexical decision on a pair of letter strings. The results of both experiments showed the semantic satiation. These results suggested that a lexical decision task was able to detect the satiation as long as the task was complicated.