Language comprehension and production tasks¶

Words, sentences or pictures are read, heard, named or generated; reading time, naming latency, lexical decision speed and fluency counts are the measures.

This family contains 8 tasks.

Lexical Decision ¶

Speeded word/nonword judgment; RT and accuracy index lexical access and are sensitive to frequency, priming, and context. Engages 5 processes.

Phonological Awareness ¶

Rhyme judgment, phoneme deletion, or phoneme blending tasks index sensitivity to the sound structure of language. Engages 4 processes.

Picture Naming ¶

Naming of pictured objects; RT and errors index lexical retrieval and are sensitive to name agreement, frequency, and age of acquisition. Engages 6 processes.

Participants press a key to reveal each word or phrase of a sentence/passage; reading time per region indexes online processing difficulty and is sensitive to syntactic, semantic, and discourse-level manipulations. Engages 4 processes.

Semantic Priming ¶

Lexical or semantic decision on targets preceded by semantically related or unrelated primes; RT facilitation indexes automatic semantic activation. Engages 4 processes.

Sentence Comprehension ¶

Reading or listening to locally ambiguous sentences; reading-time disruptions and offline comprehension indexes syntactic reanalysis. Engages 6 processes.

Verb Generation ¶

Produce a verb associated with each presented noun; indexes lexical-semantic retrieval and inhibition of prepotent responses, with well-known left-prefrontal activation. Engages 5 processes.

Verbal Fluency ¶

Generate as many words as possible within a time limit matching a phonemic (letter) or semantic (category) constraint; production count and clustering/switching patterns index executive-lexical retrieval. Engages 4 processes.