Language test as a smartphone app
Dok or dog which of these is a real word, and which is not? Researchers use lexical decision tasks like this to find out what happens in the brain when people read words. Up to now, such experiments were carried out in the language laboratories of institutes and universities, where the participants sat in front of a computer monitor and indicated whether the sequence of letters presented on a screen made sense or not by pressing "yes" and "no" buttons. As part of an international research project, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have liberated this traditional test from the confines of their research laboratory. Since December of last year, they offer the lexical decision task as an app in seven languages, which can be downloaded onto smartphones. As a result, in just four months' time they have collected the volume of data...