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Updated: May 19, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words
Barbara J Juhasz1, Melvin J Yap
1Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, 207 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA. bjuhasz@wesleyan.edu
Abstract:
Sensory experience ratings (SERs) reflect the extent to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the mind of the reader. Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, and Gullick (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:1683-1691, 2011) demonstrated that SERs predict a significant amount of variance in lexical-decision response times in two megastudies of lexical processing when a large number of established psycholinguistic variables are controlled for. Here we provide the SERs for the 2,857 monosyllabic words used in the Juhasz et al. study, as well as newly collected ratings on 3,000 disyllabic words. New analyses with the combined set of words confirmed that SERs predict a reliable amount of variance in the lexical-decision response times and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota, Yap, Cortese, Hutchison, Kessler, Loftus, & Treiman, Behavior Research Methods 39:445-459, 2007) when a large number of surface, lexical, and semantic variables are statistically controlled for. The results suggest that the relative availability of sensory/perceptual information associated with a word contributes to lexical-semantic processing.
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