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Updated: Sep 20, 2025

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Cognition ratings for 8826 english words
Hannah T Corenblum1, Penny M Pexman2
1Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Canada. hcorenbl@uwo.ca.
None:
Many abstract words refer to internal cognitive events or states, such as thinking or believing, or to cognitive products, such as theories, ideas, or whims (Binder et al., Cognitive Neuropsychology, 33, 130-174, 2016). Mental state information is proposed to be an important component in the grounding of abstract meaning (Kiefer et al., 2022, Muraki et al., 2022), such that our inner cognitive experiences form a foundational aspect of semantic representation. We tested this proposal by first collecting cognition ratings for over 8000 English words. Then, we used the norms generated from our ratings to examine the unique variance explained by cognition ratings in performance on lexical-semantic tasks. We found a significant effect of cognition, such that there was a facilitative relationship between cognition ratings and behavioral responses, even when controlling for other key lexical and semantic variables. Specifically, words rated as more cognitive in nature elicited faster and more accurate task responses, especially for words with more abstract meanings. This study highlights a novel behavioral effect that is consistent with a multidimensional account of semantic representation.
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