Comparing word processing times in naming, lexical decision, and progressive demasking: evidence from Chronolex

• ¹ Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France
• ² Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
• ³ Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neuropsychologie Cognitive, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University Paris Descartes, Paris, France
• ⁴ Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du Développement, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Bourgogne and Institut Universitaire de France, Dijon, France
• ⁵ Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, Saclay, France

We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD. For word naming, it is the first phoneme. PDM was more influenced by a semantic variable (word imageability) than LD, but was also affected to a much greater extent by perceptual variables (word length, first phoneme/letters). This may reduce its usefulness as a psycholinguistic word recognition task.