The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.
Participants were presented with a string of letters (either a word or a nonword) and asked to press one button if the string is a word and another button if the string is a nonword. In the speeded naming task, participants saw a visual word (or sometimes a nonword) and were asked to name the word aloud as quickly and as accurately as possible.