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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Is there room for the BBC in the mental lexicon? On the recognition of acronyms
Marc Brysbaert1, Sara Speybroeck, Dieter Vanderelst
1Ghent University, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. marc.brysbaert@ugent.be
Abstract:
It has been suggested that acronyms like BBC are processed like real words. This claim has been based on improved performance with acronyms in the Reicher-Wheeler task, the letter string matching task, the visual feature integration task, and the N400 component in event-related potential (ERP) studies. Unfortunately, in all these tasks performance on acronyms resembled performance on pseudowords more than performance on words. To further assess the similarity of acronyms and words, we focused on the meaning of the acronyms and used masked priming to examine whether target words can be primed to the same extent with associatively related acronyms as with associatively related words. Such priming was possible at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 84 ms. In addition, the priming of the acronyms did not depend on the letter case in which they were presented: The target word "books" was primed as much by isbn and iSbN as by ISBN.
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