Filling the gaps: A speeded word fragment completion megastudy

Tom Heyman, Liselotte Van Akeren, Keith A. Hutchison, Gert Storms

In the speeded word fragment completion task, participants have to complete fragments such as tom_to as quickly and accurately as possible. Previous work has shown that this paradigm can successfully capture subtle priming effects (Heyman, De Deyne, Hutchison, & Storms Behavior Research Methods, 47, 580-606, 2015). In addition, it has several advantages over the widely used lexical decision task. That is, the speeded word fragment completion task is more efficient, more engaging, and easier. Given its potential, we conducted a study to gather speeded word fragment completion norms. The goal of this megastudy was twofold. On the one hand, it provides a rich database of over 8,000 stimuli, which can, for instance, be used in future research to equate stimuli on baseline response times. On the other hand, the aim was to gain insight into the underlying processes of the speeded word fragment completion task. To this end, item-level regression and mixed-effects analyses were performed on the response latencies using 23 predictor variables. Since all items were selected from the Dutch Lexicon Project (Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 174, 2010), we ran the same analyses on lexical decision latencies to compare the two tasks. Overall, the results revealed many similarities, but also some remarkable differences, which are discussed. We propose that both tasks are complementary when examining visual word recognition. The article ends with a discussion of potential process models of the speeded word fragment completion task.