A time-to-event analysis of auditory lexical decision latencies

We report the results of an analysis of the auditory lexical decision latencies in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision database (MALD) [9] using a statistical technique for time-to-event analysis: the piece-wise exponential additive mixed models (PAMM) [2, 1, 3]. The PAMM models the probability of an instantaneous response at each point in time, rather than the response times themselves. The analysis revealed an increased instantaneous probability of a response for high frequency words, as well as for words from sparse phonological neighborhoods. These effects were most prominent during the early stages of the decision making process, but remained significant throughout large parts of the response window. Furthermore, we observed a more transient early effect of the temporal distance to the uniqueness point. The PAMM analysis of the MALD data thus provides more insight into the temporal dynamics of lexical processing in the auditory lexical decision task.