How well do word recognition measures correlate? Effects of language context and repeated presentations

Abstract

In the present study we assessed the extent to which different word recognition time measures converge, using large databases of lexical decision times and eyetracking measures. We observed a low proportion of shared variance between these measures, which limits the validity of lexical decision times to real-life reading. We further investigated and compared the role of word frequency and length, two important predictors of word-processing latencies in these paradigms, and found that they influenced the measures to different extents. A second analysis of two different eyetracking corpora compared the eyetracking reading times for short paragraphs with those from reading of an entire book. Our results revealed that the correlations between eyetracking reading times of identical words in two different corpora are also low, suggesting that the higher-order language context in which words are presented plays a crucial role. Finally, our findings indicate that lexical decision times better resemble the average processing time of multiple presentations of the same word, across different language contexts.