A new model of lexical decision: MROM+

International audience; Grainger and Jacobs’s (1996) multiple readout model (MROM) provided an influential account of performance in the lexical decision task. In MROM, nonword responses are generated by a temporal deadline mechanism (T-criterion), and recent work has pointed to several deficiencies with this specific mechanism (Ratcliff et al., 2004; Wagenmakers et al., 2008). Our new model maintains the core structure of MROM while replacing the deficient T-criterion. As in MROM, time from stimulus onset plays a key role in generating “nonword” responses, but time is used in an active manner as opposed to the passive deadline mechanism of MROM. Time from stimulus onset activates the negative response node in a competitive binary decision network, whereas lexical activity provides the input to the positive response node. Evidence for a nonword is therefore a function of time from stimulus onset modulated by lexical activity.