The Number and Relatedness of a Word’s Meanings in a Lexical Decision Task

Past lexical decision studies investigating the number and relatedness of meanings effect have produced mixed results. In the present experiment, we selected 20 ambiguous words and 12 non-words, and asked 30 English major students to judge whether they were real words or not, and then recorded their reaction time. In lexical decision tasks, relatedness (high or low), NOM (many or few), and nonword condition were manipulated. After an analysis of variance, we find that the NOM effect is significant but no significant effect of relatedness was observed in the experiment. The results show that the number of a word’s meanings can influence lexical decision performance.